In a series of recent posts, our own John Mark Walker has been discussing the viability of open source business models and what the term open core really means to the FOSS community. He makes several great points and calls out the increasingly common practice of companies turning open source efforts into a viral marketing play, when it can be so much more.
Given the competitive nature of business, it's probably too much to ask the commercial software development industry to be self-policing and put an end to calling a product open source simply because it uses an OSI-approved license. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, thinks it's time to hold vendors' feet to the fire and make them prove themselves to be true supporters of the open source community. He has a plan.
