Just saw this statement on succesful open source projects by Jay Kreps on the Linkedin blog:
The long-term success of an open source project depends on its not being controlled by a single company, person, group, but forming a real self-sustaining group of interested developers.
I couldn’t agree more. Open Source is about group collaboration. One single company trying to control an opensource project isn’t going to give you the real benefits of open source. I don’t believe many companies will succeed just by creating and selling open source software. Collaboration on opensource software makes more sense when you need it, but don’t sell it. Or, as Jay writes:
This is our goal in working on the open source project. LinkedIn is not a storage systems company, and neither are the other web companies facing some of the same problems, so we think we think we can all benefit by sharing our work in this area.