OStatic

There was an interesting write up on Forbes.com this week discussing who contributes most to open source projects -- and why. Even though many open source projects have a commercial or institutional component that contributes some degree of direction (or funding) to software development, and even though many businesses and institutions use open source software regularly, the vast majority of contributions to these projects come from individuals.

Forbes' Dan Woods, after hearing Alfresco's Matt Asay and Eclipse's Ian Skerrett speak of this contributor gap, concluded that there must be something very different about how institutions contribute.

Ben Kepes at Cloud Ave. offers some interesting analysis of a question Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor recently tackled on his company's blog: Has software as a service (SaaS) killed open source as a business model?

The question raised, of course, is why these concepts are at odds at all -- why are they mutually exclusive? They aren't, per se (SaaS companies can -- and do -- offer their code under open licenses), but Kapoor imagines that for some companies, SaaS takes a bit of the shine from open source. Kepes counters that while this might be the case, SaaS has a fair bit to gain from the open source model.