Why Investors Back Open Source: Altruism or Investment?

All the Open Source folks jump for joy whenever they hear about x number of Linux servers being sold (when that's not really a great metric), or how much money is backing an open source project... it always seems that they forget the reason why people do invest in open source - or anything. Investment means people expect to turn a profit.

For people who cannot understand that concept, Matthew Aslett backs it with verbage from Harvard Business School:

The Harvard Business School has published the preliminary draft an interesting report that confirms one thing we probably could have guessed - that vendors invest in open source for economic, rather than altruistic, reasons - and calculates a number of things we probably couldn't - such as the fact that vendors invested $2bn in open source software between 1995 and 2005.

The report also states that Linux was the recipient of 75% of all vendor investment in open source software, during that 10 year time frame, with $1.5bn plowed into Linux, $317m into the Firefox browser, $76m into the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and $48m into the MySQL database.

The only other projects to receive significant vendor backing, according to the study, were the PHP scripting language with $24m, the Tcl scripting language with $15m, and the JBoss middleware stack with $10m...

Of course, there's no link to this draft of the report that I could find and a quick search didn't reveal it. It will turn up someday and be neatly piled with other such papers - but in this instance, you have to admit that the numbers are interesting. That's a lot of money involved.