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

Re:eh?

[chris_eineke]

Last time I checked the state of Red Hat et al made not a mote of difference to my project.

Is your program written in C? Or is written in a language that uses C as its intermediary? Or is it written in a language whose interpreter was written in C? Then RedHat does made a mote of difference since, afaik, they're one of the bigger contributors to gcc.

Re:I completely agree

[Kjella]

KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined.

Well, I'm not that familiar with the KDE toolkit beyond being a KDE user, but I'd say the Qt toolkit is certainly being highly refined by Trolltech. With the release of Qt4, pretty much the whole KDE project has gone into a big upgrade cycle, with KDE4 out in late October. So while it might seem KDE progress has been slow in the last year or two, I think it will raise the bar when it arrives.