In a post today, Matt Asay considers whether governments could effectively subsidize open source development. I agree with his point that enterprises may "come to recognize that their failure to replenish open source communities with either cash or code may come to harm the code commons from which they derive increasing amounts of value." We've also had several people say in OStatic interviews, including Sam Ramji--Microsoft's open source chief--that open source needs better monetization models. In our latest interview,  with FreeNAS' founder, he says that "one of the best things for open source would be for our employers to give us time to work on our open source projects." Perhaps more employers should go beyond that.

Few recent trends in storage have had as much momentum as Network Attached Storage (NAS). A NAS device can make a network more efficient and secure by supplying file-based data storage services to networked devices, or it can be used for applications such as streaming media. FreeNAS is free, lightweight, open source network-attached storage server software, based on FreeBSD. You can find a good tutorial on how to set up a free NAS server with it here. We recently caught up with Olivier Cochard-Labbe, FreeNAS founder, and Volker Theile, project administrator.