Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?

An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"

Comments

Yes.

[Caspian]

If I want an OS that Just Works, I go with Mac OS X. If I want an OS to play video games, I go with Windows. If I want an OS that's open-source, I go with Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD or NetBSD. I've never understood the point of the commercial Linux distros. They're generally bigger and bloatier than the "free" distros, they don't make it any easier to play Windows games or run Windows apps, and they suffer from the same driver availability issues that most non-Windows OSes suffer from (due to asshole hardware vendors that only want to support one company, but still). About their only 'selling point' is that PHB types take them more seriously-- but, then again, PHB types take Windows seriously as a server OS, and if you wanted a serious server-grade Un*x, you might as well go with Solaris.