An unfinished article originally published February 5, 2005:

The January 31, 2005 issue of Computerworld doesn't discuss it - but the headlines don't lie: 

A) Zend raises funds from Intel, SAP
B) Mapics acquired in $350M deal
C) Open-source gnaws its way into the heart of Oregon's economy
D) Sun begins its release of Open-Source Solar Code 

And there are several other articles that discuss even more open source initiatives. Important questions remain. Are Open Source initiatives forcing commercial vendors to consolidate or disappear? Does the future belong to Open Source? (article in progress)

It's free, or not to be...

IBM released database (Cloudscape) technology as open source. Computer Associates released its Ingress database to the open source community. SAP gave it's MaxDB to MySQL as open source. These major software vendors hope to gain market share to increase services revenue, making these open source offerings loss-leaders, in a sense. But, without the mass development made possible through an open source model, these databases likely would not have been able to compete with more successful commercial competitors DB2, Oracle and SQLServer and their deep-pocketed vendors. Sun's release of Solaris as open source seems like an admission that it can't compete with Windows, but possibly with Linux... 

Of course, most open source software is hardly recycled shelfware. Linux, Apache's HTTP server, MySQL's database and the PHP web scripting language have proven their superiority over commercial rivals for many applications - and it will be even more difficult for the commercial vendors to catch up.

High-quality open source applications have started to prove worthy in higher-end applications as well.SugarCRM (and others) offer full-function CRM applications via open source. Open source content management applications (too numerous to mention), customer service / help desk, compete more than favorably with their commercial counterparts. 

Why is it free? 

Is it secure?