Software patents have long been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community; patents are by far the biggest restraint on our ability to program our own computers. Those who worry about these things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from software companies with fading prospects.

In the old "pre 2000" day, the objective of most technology companies when they applied for patent protection was to ensure that their products and technologies were not copied by their competitors. The idea was that thanks to the patents you enjoyed about 20 years of exclusive use of your technology, after which everyone was free to use it because by then it was considered obvious.

It's important to see open source as a business methodology. No more, no less. It's a way of life for software companies that want to work with others. The "others" could include other companies, and individuals independent of either. Open source software build communities around themselves, and are guarded by licenses.

The new frontiers for open source companies are social networking-related applications and Software as a Service, said Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange. "The appetite now in the venture community is to identify companies, like ours, that sell open source products into the Software as a Service environment," he said.

At stake here is far more than SCO's existence. It is the front line in a battle between two diametrically opposed ideologies. In the red corner we have open source - the idea that software should be freely available and that it is best developed by a community of interested individuals who incrementally add to it for the common good.

Who says that Microsoft and free software developers are enemies?

OpenLogic provides the kind of support for open source software that many companies have come to expect with commercial software, as summed up by one of OpenLogic's bloggers:

"What we consistently hear is that companies need and want the same services for open source software that they get from proprietary software. Hence the rise of open source companies…."

Faced with a potentially large threat to free/libre and open source software from patent consortium CPTN, the two organisations have collaborated publicly for the first time. Before Christmas Open Source Initiative (OSI) wrote to the German Federal Cartel Office asking them to investigate the acquisition of Novell assets by the CPTN Group as a possibly anti-competitive move by CPTN's four members.

"Web 2.0 software-as-a-service applications built on top of the LAMP stack now generate several orders of magnitude more revenue than any companies seeking to directly monetize open source. And most of the software used by those Web 2.0 companies above the commodity platform layer is proprietary. Not only that, Web 2.0 is siphoning developers and buzz away from open source."