When it comes to selling a commercial open source product, how different is it really from selling a proprietary product? In the end, if it's a good product, the fact it's open source is probably a minor factor for buyers.

I propose that Product Management should take a more active role in FOSS, not telling the developers what users need, but teamingwith developers to identify the target audience and prioritize the users needs. If developers can donate their time working on these projects there is no reason Product Managers can’t do the same thing.

According to market research, open-source developers rate software quality for their tools more harshly than do developers who specialize in proprietary solutions. Esther Schindler contemplates possible explanations.

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.

British open source advocates will be boosted by the news that German support vendor Credativ is expanding its open source center (OSSC) to support all distributions of Linux in the U.K.

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.

Given all the great consumer-facing open source software available, I figured I'd try to evaluate and write reviews on those I use most often. Open source long ago stopped being about developers for other developers. Here's proof.

"Good tools are a developer's dream. I've been hearing the lament for better open source tools for open technology stacks ever since I started working with Mozilla. Today ActiveState is announcing the Open Komodo Project, bringing new open source tools for web developers into the Mozilla world..."

Open Source development is pretty close to Anarchism. Still, we rely on the courts and government to protect Open Source. What if we were to lose that support, what would the Open Source ecosystem look like then?