Marc Fleury, JBoss founder and now a senior vice president and general manager of the JBoss Division of Red Hat, stressed that people working on open source software should get paid for their work. "I'm still amazed that I'm fighting that battle nowadays," he said.

Sun Microsystems' Rich Green, executive vice president for software, repeated Sun's mantra that Sun is probably the No. 1 contributor to open source, although the company takes flack (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/22/78520_21OPopenent_1.html) for allegedly not being an open source vendor. He also noted Sun started out using Berkeley Unix and Network File System, which have been freely available.

Asked to comment on how the commercial software giants -- Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP -- will deal with an open source world, panelists had mixed opinions.

"If Microsoft open-sourced all these apps, they'd have tremendous opportunity in the marketplace," given the company's services and reach, said Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Labs.

But Microsoft is not confused about open source, Fleury stressed. "They hate it," but will collaborate on it, he said. JBoss has a collaboration agreement (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/27/HNmsjosslinkup_1.html) with Microsoft.