LinuxWorld: The Commercialization of Open Source

“We’ve all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in
funding and now it’s time to sit back and mull it over. Without a
doubt this infusion of capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss
Group. But is this investment a good thing for open source? Not an
unimportant question for those of us who have decided to use open
source in our enterprise applications.

“If organizations are just now deciding to use open source, this
announcement could cause them to rethink their decision and weigh
the possibility that their choice may not be so open as it has
been. We do have a few exemplars that we can draw from to help us
understand what could happen. The most obvious are IBM alphaWorks,
the Apache Foundation, and the various Linux vendors, some of whom
have IPOed…”

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