While the Googlers want to talk today about improvements to GMail for mobile, there remains a serious concern for you to discuss this weekend.

Is Google really good at being part of an open source community?

There are three types of mobile source projects:

1. One-company projects.
2. Multiple-company projects.
3. Community projects, which may or may not have a commercial arm.

Can Google build open source communities | Open Source | ZDNet.com

Last week, I spent a lot of time with the folks from Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) paid $410 million for, only to turn around and donate the assets to an open-source foundation. What I wanted to know was how the employees—who were once programmed to make profits and sell licenses—were adapting to a life as a non-profit, which gave away code and incorporated the intellectual property of others? From the outside, it appears the transition is going well. Over the past few months, the Foundation’s openness has been demonstrated through its blog, which informs people of everything from the move into new offices to the latest software launch. The vocabulary is very deliberate, using words such as “community,” “movement,” and “heart” whenever possible. Developers and outsiders are encouraged to give their opinions, and frequently, Symbian responds with an explanation, even when criticized (I’ll get to that later).

Symbian has no simple task in front of it. This may be the largest open-source endeavor that any one entity has ever attempted. As Nokia executives have said before, it brings together millions of lines of code that companies have invested billions of dollars to create. But the radical decision to open-source the software clearly demonstrates the mounting competition from new entrants, such as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), the LiMo Foundation, Google’s Android operating system and even incumbent platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. In some ways, Symbian had no choice.

The Making Of Open Source: Checking In On The Symbian ‘Movement’ | mocoNews

It is meant to illustrate the costs of “upgrading” from a proprietary to a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solution in your IT shop.

The open source sea change and the Taylor graph | Open Source | ZDNet.com

OpenMoko said it will not be making successors to its open source Neo FreeRunner smartphone.

Speaking at a conference in Switzerland, OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz said the company will discontinue development on the next iteration of its Linux-based smartphone, as the FreeRunner only sold about 10,000 units. The company will focus on a supporting the existing smartphone, as well as a new product that’s not a mobile phone, Moss-Pultz said.

OpenMoko Ending Open Source Smartphone — Open Source Smartphone — InformationWeek

That latest piece of Microsoft nonsense makes too easy a target and is not my real focus here. I would rather dig into the true financial story behind migrating to free software.

The true cost of migrating to open source – at ZDNet.co.uk

Well, that hasn’t happened. In fact it seems as if the two operating systems are determined to coexist in the IT world.

With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to list the ways in which Microsoft could help Linux solidify itself as a viable enterprise and end user solution.

10 ways Microsoft could help Linux – Program – Linux – Builder AU

rPath founder and CTO Erik Troan recently discussed the future of open source as part of a series of Ostatic contributions written by select participants in this week’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). In his commentary, Erik argues, convincingly, that the future of open source belongs to the developer community–but with an emphasis on frameworks and pre-built components, rather than tools.

Erik suggests this will drive productivity and shift developers’ orientation from features to application composition, and programming from the creation of features to the creation of the “glue code” that binds together pre-built components.

I think he’s quite right.

[ Integrated mar.com ]

That’s right. Despite Gartner finding that 85 percent of enterprises have already adopted open source and Forrester Research’s consulting arm finding that 45 percent of all companies that are using open-source software use it for mission-critical applications, the adoption appears to be somewhat thin, leaving a great deal of room for even more adoption, especially in open-source applications.

Forrester: Lots of room for open-source growth | The Open Road – CNET News

We’re going old school — like, long-before-your-editor-was-born school — to set the mood for this one. Microsoft’s been talking open source again, which usually leads to anger in the open source community, double-talk from Redmond and confusion for the rest of us.

Not long ago, Microsoft dropped a white paper on how great a job it’s doing of “actively participating in open source.” You can download the white paper here, but we’ll warn you that the PDF crashed your editor’s Firefox browser multiple times but worked fine in Internet Explorer (seriously). That’s just a word of warning. That’s all we’re saying. Any irony you might derive from that little revelation is purely your own and not the responsibility of RCPU.

Redmond Channel Partner Online | Lee Pender: Why Does Microsoft Pretend To Be Open Source-Friendly?

The company’s ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09 just last month, has been published under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

Microsoft’s latest open-source release catches a wrinkle • The Register