"Companies that provide third-party support for open-source software can be divided into two groups, roughly speaking.
"In the first group are what could be called 'professional services companies'--those vendors who provide support for a specific platform. An example is Progeny, which now patches the versions of Red Hat the leading Linux vendor no longer supports.
"The second group is comprised of management companies--firms that build software to administer the open-source stack. An example is Covelent, which builds an application that provides a user interface to manage the full stack of open-source programs..."
