Panelists representing companies such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Oracle were queried at the on Tuesday about commercial involvement in the open source arena.

"It seems to us from where we sit that there's really no choice," said Tim Bray, a Web -oriented generalist at Sun and a co-inventor of XML. "A substantial portion of the market has made it clear with their wallets that they want to deploy and run open source software."

"We can't go back. It's too late," Bray said.

The business model around open source is monetizing at the point of value, when users are ready to go into production; this is easier to understand and more satisfying to users than writing big checks for software licenses, Bray said. Generation of revenues in the open source market largely has involved selling customer support services while offering the software itself for free.

An IBM official added that innovation, which had occurred at the university and vendor levels, now is happening in the open community at large.