It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.

Oracle was previously slated over how it handled MySQL – the company now has a new plan to involve the community.

The drivers and benefits of using open source in the enterprise have been widely documented. Ultimately, enterprise users adopt open source for two primary reasons: cost and vendor independence. These ...