Encouraging corporate contributions. How to make millions with open source. Or not. Red Hat and IBM celebrate 10 years of mutual appreciation. Nokia borrows €500m to invest in Symbian. And more.

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Encouraging corporate contributions
Reaction began to filter through later this week to the previously mentioned Forbes article on the “collaboration gap” between corporate open source users and contributors.

Matt Asay agreed with Forbes writer Dan Woods that the secret might lay in measuring the benefits of participation so that investors and stock analysts will begin to demand evidence of those benefits being achieved.

This brings to mind recent posts on here about open source citizenship and responsibility. Oracle, IBM and Sun already include open source within their corporate responsibility reports. How long before this is the norm?

Meanwhile Savio Rodrigues argued that corporate open source contribution policies are needed, noting that without them corporate developers are probably contributing code, but on their own time, so as not to risk upsetting the powers that be.

How to make millions with open source. Or not.
Dave Rosenberg resurrected the issue of open source revenue strategies with his post about pricing models and licensing for open source. In response to his question as to how vendors “provide more value for the dollar… in a way that makes a highly scalable, highly monetizable business” RedMonk’s Michael Coté responded with his thoughts on open source business strategies.

Coté hit the nail on the head, I think, with his comment that “the issue is not if this is good, bad, open, or closed source. Rather, the question is how much revenue any given company can get from such a service” and also that “you can build a fine business of ‘pure open source.’ It’s those ‘highly scalable, highly monetizable business’ are a tougher nut to crack and a little help from closed source can look like a big mallet.”

I would agree with the comment from Mike Dolan that Coté’s assessment overlooks the role of embedded uses of open source, but I think I’ll come back to that next week.

Best of the rest
# Red Hat and IBM celebrated 10 years of mutual appreciation.

# Bloomberg reported that Google Android may run on Asus Netbook.

# Nokia received a €500m loan from the European Investment Bank to invest in Symbian devices, as well as the Symbian Foundation.

# Arkeia Software claimed to support 100 different Linux platforms.

# eZ Systems released eZ Find 2.0 for enterprise search, based on Apache Solr.

# SAP.info reported on SAP’s strategy with regards to open source, 451 clients can also read our take on the strategy.

# xTuple claimed 250% sales growth in 2007.

# The Times published a major article on open source software. Nothing groundbreaking, but good mainstream coverage.

# Ariba released AribaWeb RIA development framework under the Apache license.

# The 2009 “Future of Open Source” Survey, sponsored by InfoWorld-OSBC and North Bridge Venture Partners is now live.

# InformationWeek reported that Ubuntu is about to be certified for HP servers, although neither Canonical nor HP has officially announced it.

# Stormy Peters listed 5 types of company open source relationships.

# Mass High Tech reported on mending the VC model noting that as big VCs are slow to invest small funds see opportunities. This is somewhat off-topic for most, but highly relevant to the next CAOS report, due out in early April.