Is the open source stampede destined to continue unimpeded? It’s a question to ponder.Officials in the open source industry serving on a panel at Stanford University on Tuesday discussed business models for open source products. Options were examined such as selling support or services for an open source technology – a pure play model – or simply using open source contributions in your commercial product.I still have to wonder how far a pure play open source model can go, or at least how far it can go if software companies want to be zealous in generating lots of money. A Microsoft official, for his part, last year also openly questioned the economics of open source. If we look at Red Hat, considered perhaps the most noteworthy open source software vendor, the dollar signs are not eye-popping. Red Hat, which does in fact use a subscription model, reported revenues only in the $45 million range in recent quarters. Not bad, but hardly in the billion-dollar neighborhood. Open source is continuing its momentum, though. A new version of the PostgreSQL database released on Wednesday is aimed squarely at commercial rivals. An analyst at Forrester Research, Noel Yuhanna, said the open source database market will grow from its current $120 million size to a $1 billion market in three years. Some traditional commercial databases might even become open source as the trend moves forward, Yuhanna said.Of course for users, the question of how to make money on open source doesn’t really matter, at least in the short run. Users no longer have to pay licensing fees and can get their software for free. Can’t argue with that. As long as the products keep getting upgraded, who needs to pay for them? But Andrew Morton, lead maintainer of the Linux kernel, said in November that leading-edge projects in open source are the exception, not the rule. Anyone with a leading-edge technology ought to try to get rich with it first, he said. One example of this could be StreamBase Systems, which is implementing a commercial, subscription-based pricing model for its data processing application for streams rather than traveling the open source route.What would any of you do if you had something fabulous – take it open source or go commercial first? Let’s hear from you. I am at paul_krill@infoworld.com. Also: The article on the discussion at Stanford University, which included talk about the patents issue, drew a heated response from one reader. “All patents ar evil,” the reader wrote. He also dismissed the notion of intellectual property and suggested “viral open source patents,” an open patent system, as an alternative. FWIW, the issue of patents was touched upon in a blog entry here last week. Also: BEA Systems in February is tentatively scheduled to unveil its Project Da Vinci family of products for the telco industry. Briefly mentioned last month, the technology is expected to feature SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and VOIP functionality. Technology Industry