"Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source
encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete —
both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind.
Goodbye World Book and Brittanica...

A little over a year ago, we took a look at 10 Commercial Open Source Security Vendors. As we set out to update that list, two facts jumped out: 1) the number of open source security apps with commercial support has grown substantially and 2) the line between open source and commercial applications continues to blur.

Steve Goodman, co-founder and CEO of network management startup PacketTrap Networks, is predicting that commercial open source companies are doomed to fail. Goodman's not railing against open source or commercial software, per se. It's converting the former into the latter that he sees as inherently flawed.

Is the true open source revolution finally coming to college campuses this fall?

As a researcher, imprecise naming bothers me. The general confusion around the terms commercial open source, professional open source, and community open source warrants closer analysis.

While it's pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you'd like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you'll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future.

One of the key elements that helps to enable open source software applications to gain broader enterprise usage is the availability of commercial support options. In the case of the open source MongoDB NoSQL database, that commercial support is now coming from project backer 10gen.

The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?