Companies drive open source success?

A new report says that large IT vendors are responsible for open source's accelerated adoption and change.

From the report:

While open source software is omnipresent, and its presence is growing more rapidly than previously estimated, the basic nature of open source software is changing from project-based, developer-driven community initiatives to vendor-driven, and vendor-owned, software. One result of this is to make traditional methods of measuring open source’s presence and roles within user enterprises impractical.

Increasingly, people are finding that much of open source development is actually being directed and supported by companies like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and others -- rather than being the exclusive domain of unpaid volunteers. Though, the effect of the volunteer contributors should not be overlooked, either. It was the volunteers, early adopters, and early commercial supporters that put FOSS on the radar.

As John E. Dunn points out, vendors "have had to integrate some elements of open source into its environment because that was what the market was telling them to do."

If you look through the history of open source, it's clear that vendor involvement and open source adoption go hand-in-hand. Commercial involvement has driven the adoption of open source at nearly every turn. Companies like Red Hat and SUSE drove adoption of Linux when it was still rough around the edges by packaging and selling it and continually making it more suitable for use by a wider audience with each release.