[stoppingdown]

@Klaus Open source doesn't mean that they code for free (even though some people are actually coding for free, but they're getting paid in other ways: by means of consultancy, or by means of experience that can be showed off in the CV). In many cases, I'd say most of the popular projects, the open source project is mostly supported by paid employees, such as Google, Oracle or IBM. Openness means that the source code is available and single developers can provide patches. It's quite useful in case you need an extra feature or a bug fixed that is not very popular and thus not a top priority of the project owner. There's also a sort of insurance against vendor lock-in, even though in many cases this is more a potential point rather than an effective one.

 

In any case, I'm not seeing cloud getting rid of open source... On the contrary, many cloud systems are powered by open source software, Linux included, and Tomcat et al. are quite popular in the cloud.