Back after a lot of travel. Just finished a discussion of what makes an open source company successful, and found one of the better summaries that I've seen in the Seattle paper. Here's the essence...

In order to choose winners, Sturiale said at the conference last week, his firm evaluates open source projects based upon downloads, community vibrancy, intellectual-property ownership and coherent business models. For him, those companies that simply rely on support contracts could run into problems

Like they say, the smartest statements are often the easiest to understand...