According to a recent article in News.com by Ingrid Marson ("Microsoft: Open source 'not reliable or dependable"), Microsoft is not so hip on open source.

Basically, open source is a New Age way of developing software.  That is, instead of a big company developing it, a community of developers across the world contribute to the development of a software product. 

In an upcoming BBC documentary, a Microsoft vice president says that open source software is not ready for the prime time of  "reliability and dependability that comes from a commercial model."

Actually, open source providers are starting to get some serious traction.  Look at Zimbra, which develops a Web-based alternative to Microsoft Exchange. Only two  years old, the company already has several 100k seat enterprise deployments (such as H&R Block). What's more, the company is working on a 1 million telco deployment.

I had a chance to talk to the company's CTO, Scott Dietzen, who said: "You can argue that open source has taken a play right out of the Microsoft play-book by driving software costs down further than even Microsoft (who's success in part was due to their being a lower cost provider)."

Another top provider in open source is Jitterbit, which develops software for integration. I also talked to the company's CTO and co-founder, Ilan Seyahek who mentioned that companies like Dell, Google and Amazon.com are already big users of open source. "Market adoption is the only relevant fact to consider when forming an opinion on the reliability and dependability of open source products," said Seyahek.

BBC - The Code Breakers

News.com - Microsoft: Open source 'not reliable or dependable

Zimbra Interview

Jitterbit Interview