Just for a point of clarity, I was merely making the argument that both Apple and IBM have figured out how to leverage open source in their respective business

Just for a point of clarity, I was merely making the argument that both Apple and IBM have figured out how to leverage open source in their respective business models in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily claiming that either of them are religious, RMS-style open source boosters. They each have figured out ways they can use open source to benefit their bottom line. IBM is basically a services company for the most part. The more they can do to reduce the amount of money a customer is paying in software licensing (sometimes to other companies), the more they can charge for their own services on a project. It is to their benefit for there to be as much free (as in beer) software out there as possible so a higher percentage of a project's overall budget goes to IBM. Apple is primarily a hardware company. It is in their interest to make use of whatever community software is out there so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel for everything. They look to open source software as a way to augment what they can do internally without having to acquire tons of software companies just to get basic software technology in-house. This frees up cash for hardware R&D and aquisitions (PA Semi, Fingerworks, etc...). Sun has suffered from an identity crisis in recent years. Were they a software company? A hardware company? Both? They don't appear to have been able to answer that question themselves. It's hard to have an open source strategy (or any other kind of strategy for that matter) when you don't even know what business you're in.