Am I missing something here?Last week, a well-known member of the open source movement, Apache founder Brian Behlendorf, talked about how open source was on the cusp of mass acceptance. But Behlendorf, speaking at a conference entitled, “Open Source: Practical Solutions for Real World Problems,” noted most people in the audience probably still had Windows on their laptops. He also suggested that companies are not willing to give up their “cash cow” software to open source. Pardon me, but am I missing something here? Do people make money in a capitalist system by giving things away?I know there are vendors such as MySQL and Red Hat, who have had some success giving up their software for free under the GPL while also selling it under a commercial license with added perks such as support. Behlendorf noted that using software via a Web site also is becoming an alternative to buying a software product.But can the open source model be extrapolated out to the entire software industry? An attorney at the open source event raised the question of whether someone could inadvertently contribute something to open source that technically is his employer’s property. Hence, everybody needs to earn a buck somehow, and giving away software may not be the way to do it. The open source and Linux community is a devoted one. A few years ago I covered a Linux event even though I was not feeling well that day and filed an article. The piece showed up on a Linux devotees’ site the next day, replete with a line-by-line critique.Perhaps 2004 will be the year the question gets answered as to how much market share open source software can take away from commercial software. We shall see. Technology Industry