"I'm covering the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week, and holy cow, there are a lot of bright people gathered here. Men (and a smattering of women) with doctorates, people who've made millions of dollars by simply thinking up good ideas for software and hardware, people who get paid very well to give other people advice, etc. You know the crowd.
"Yet, I keep hearing from these data-loaded folks that it is exceedingly difficult to quantify the use of open source software in enterprises large and small--and up and down the system stack. This seems to me to be a fundamental problem when it comes to understanding the market. And is not the IT market what we're all about?
