Open Source is an interesting subject, not to mention that the Open Source movement has become a true power through the years, providing us with a great range of freely available software.

From time to time we’ve looked at different aspects of Open Source in this blog, so we decided to cherry-pick some of our very best Open Source-related articles and present them for your reading pleasure.

• This is the money being made TODAY in Open Source – While many companies don’t disclose detailed financial information we dug around to find numbers for some well-known Open Source companies and projects to see how they are doing financially.
• 10 interesting Open Source software forks and why they happened – Much of the Open Source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. This is a look at the history of some of these software forks and why they happened in the first place.
• Women in Open Source – While they are in the minority, there are still lots of women involved in Open Source (see, it’s not all about guy geeks, there are girl geeks too ). This post highlights some of the most prominent ones.
• The seven largest Open Source deals ever – This is a list of the largest deals in Open Source history. A lot of Open Source companies have been bought in the last couple of years, with hundreds of millions of dollars trading places in the process.
• Microsoft’s Open Source, Linux and Mac labs – When you think Microsoft, Open Source isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind. But, Microsoft does have test laboratories for Open Source software as well as for their Mac products (think MS Office for Mac). Here is a little bit of insight into these “outsiders” inside Microsoft.
• Linux popularity across the globe – For many, Linux goes hand in hand with Open Source. The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular?

We hope you found these articles interesting. Thanks for reading!

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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