"Savio Rodrigues has published an interesting post about the adoption of commercial open source software that brings together his thoughts about open source business models and suggests that commercial open source vendors may be heading for a glass ceiling.

Continuing the ongoing discussion about open source software business models, Rich Sharples of Red Hat’s JBoss division weighs in on an issue I have with Savio Rodrigues’s categorization of open source users: namely the fact that it does not take into account the value of the application in question.

Savio Rodrigues has published a post arguing that cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure pose a threat to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors.

On their blogs, Matt Asay and Savio Rodrigues are discussing whether IBM is using open source to diminish competitor margins. I think it is obvious that IBM does this, most notably with its Linux engagement, which is squarely directed against Microsoft (Windows). It is what I call a war over the share of customer’s wallet, and open source plays a major role. The graph below shows how it works.

So my question is simple: Who is the open source big dog? The answer to the question as stated is likely IBM. You're welcome Savio. :-) IBM, of course, benefits nicely from its investments in Apache and Eclipse and has done a lot to make Linux what it is today. But IBM is not betting the farm on open source, so let me tweak my question to be: Who is the open source [as a business] big dog?

Open source writers who are also market players, like our Matt Asay and Infoworld’s Savio Rodrigues, are dumping on a European Commission (EC) proposal to make software sellers liable for the problems in their code, just as dishwasher makers are liable for problems.

Even as the global economy tanks, open-source companies continue to soar. A range of open-source companies reported sales and community growth this past week, including...

To me, the bottom line of all of this is that the Obama administration recognizes that information technology in the public sector can be, and should be, a two-way street.

Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., Web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary Web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.