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Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original.

We use sports metaphors for all areas of life, and business is no exception. Our favorite sports metaphors often come from baseball or football: we hit home runs, strike out, and get sacked. But no sport compares to running a business like sailboat racing.

Sailboat racing depends on many skills and factors that don't exist in other sports. In sailboat racing, you usually have more than one opponent, and teamwork is critically important. Not only does racing involve situational tactics, you also need to have a longer term strategy for the race, and this strategy may change over the course of a race series. In addition to how well you race your boat, sometimes environmental factors such as a wind shift or unexpected current can completely change the game. And while even the slowest boats may occasionally win a race with a lucky break, you have to be consistent in all these areas to come out of a regatta or race series on top.

I know of no other sport that provides a similar breadth of factors contributing to success. And the more you drill into these factors, the more parallels you see with running a business. Let's take a look at a few of these key areas.

Looks like IBM is going aggressively up against the Outlook/Exchange juggernaut. Several months ago, they made Domino, their mail server, free for any business who buys the licenses for the mail client, Notes. Now they're making Notes available for Linux.

Over at Freelock Computing, we're learning the fundamentals of business from experience. We've been doing technology for a long time, but are relatively new to business, so what we've learned is hardly innovative or new.

Sitepoint has a nice summary of when to get a merchant account, versus when to use a third-party payer such as Paypal, complete with detailed example total costs for different types of businesses.

Good introductory article on monitoring disk usage, with a nice little script to send a mail as filesystems approach their limit:

Carla Schroder covers a great network backup utility in her current series. Here's where the rubber meets the road:

Do Automated Cross-Platform Network Backups The Easy Way (Part 2)

Not to make you paranoid or anything, but here's a fascinating story of a new social engineering tactic: a new way somebody might trick you into giving away your passwords and any other sensitive stuff on your computer.

... according to Jamie Kellner, former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, in an argument that ultimately caused the demise of the ReplayTV 4000. In case you don't remember, the ReplayTV unit was essentially a Tivo that, among other things, automatically skipped commercials.

Eben Moglen on Free Software:

"The politics of open source are not anti-business or anything to be ashamed of, but a return to America's inventive roots after a period dominated by innovation-stifling monopolies."

We could be there soon. By the end of this year, if an independent survey of developers across North America is accurate.

Linux Today - Editor's Note: Tipping Point Ahead

Every day, you hear more stories about open source successes. Like this one:

Techworld.com - City finds big savings in Linux