I have many colleagues across the country working with information technology. Many of them are strong believers in the "Open Source" movement. I refer to this as a "movement" more than just a product because many believe that working with and developing open source technologies will create better products, even if the product isn't as good as commercial products today - its not just about money.

I found the article, Oracle to offer free database, an interesting result of some success in the development of open source database systems. The fact that IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are all developing free versions of their database systems - to compete with Open Source. But will it really make an impact? I'm not sure, but I believe it is a strong first step and maybe a good marketing strategy. Perhaps it will become the first step to transitioning well know commercial products to a "service-based" business model.