[whatusername]

For Historical background: An awful lot of money in software/computing has been made in proprietry systems.

Where Open Source is supported by companies is where it is a complement to their main line of business. So Google support OS browsers so that people will be online more and click on more ads. IBM likes Linux because people might buy more IBM hardware. 37signals makes web-apps and benefits from Rails. There's enough of those complements (plus altruistic applications -- think Torvalds or _Why) that we have a full ecosystem that everyone benefits from.

The money is in the closed source stuff (Google doesn't OS adsense or their core search or cluster stuff, IBM doesn't OS zOS or WebSphere, 37signals doesn't OS basecamp)