The Commercialization of Open Source

As a follow-on to my blog entry "100 Million and Counting...", the November/December issue of Enterprise Open Source Journal (EOSJ) has my article "The Commercialization of Open Source" (page 42).

This issue is shipping to print subscribers this week, and the digital edition is available online now.

I am posting the first paragraph of the article now, and will post the entire article when the next issue of EOSJ is released in late January.

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Several months ago I noticed an increase in open source funding announcements. Was this just perception or were open source investments truly on the rise? I went back through archived news reports and determined there were more than $165 million (U.S.) investments made in open source from March through October of this year. This is by no means a complete survey of open source funding during this period, only funding that has been publicly disclosed. One can infer that even more was invested in open source, but remains to this date unreported. This $165 million was spread across 21 companies that were involved with open source in some way (see figure).