Bloomberg Businessweek and New York Times Articles on Open Source

Note: Excellent study of successful open source business models that have reached global impact. OSE article is forthcoming - MJ

• Mark Shuttleworth, Open-Source Software's Sugar Daddy - [1]

• Bre Pettis: 3D Printing's First Celebrity - [2]

• RedHat - first Billion Dollar Open Source Software Company - [3] - While Red Hat’s business plan looks simple on paper, it’s difficult to pull off, Whitehurst says. The company acts as a conduit between its customers and the self-selected group of people that oversees Linux. That means Red Hat spends days selling Linux to dozens of Wall Street firms and nights working with passionate volunteer developers. Red Hat performs this dance well and has won the allegiance of Linux’s engineers by, among other things, contributing more code to the project than any other company. Oracle (ORCL) has tried to use heft and cheap prices to undercut Red Hat but hasn’t come close to overcoming the latter’s lead. “Red Hat has won and done so with premium prices,” Cross Research’s Williams says. “The data center crowd sees Red Hat as standing for a seal of approval.”

• Ping - Meet the Defenders of Open-Source ... - The New York Times - [4]

• R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com - [5]

• Ubuntu and Its Leader Set Sights on the Mainstream - NYTimes.com - [6] - Excerpt on Canonical Business Model