Some observers argue it's the latter. Despite occasional protests from oldtimers -- the heated against the Microsoft-Novell d'tente, for example -- open-source has become so co-opted by mainstream IT, so transformed by "accidental open-sourcers" simply looking for a better business model, that it's lost its cherished moral edge.

"Open-source has become a free pass for all sorts of competitive actions that would once have been -- at a minimum -- roundly criticized," wrote Gordon Haff, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc. in an online piece last month.

Haff cites IBM's release of its VisualAge software development tools to the open-source Eclipse Foundation in 2001, a move he argues has dealt near-fatal blows to commercial Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Borland's Jbuilder and Symantec's Caf'.

IBM also released its lightweight Cloudscape database in 2004 to the open-source Apache Foundation, where it is now known as Derby. Like Eclipse, Derby helps draw companies to Java, where IBM makes a tidy sum -- even more than Sun Microsystems Inc. -- hawking middleware and related tools, Haff said.

But open-sourcing Cloudscape also hurt sales at companies such as Sybase Inc., which made mobile databases the centerpiece of its "unwired enterprise" strategy, as well as open-source vendors like SleepyCat Software (now owned by Oracle Corp.) and MySQL AB, Haff said.