Michael Coté who despite being hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of hype around SpikeSource, nails it in his post. and identifies the problems with an “open source service company” business model:

For all the ballyhoo about open source being high quality, delivering features faster, etc., a huge part of open source’s advantage over commercial software is the cost: open source is free, commercial software isn’t. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the “side effect” advantages of “free,” is that you don’t have to go up the chain to get budget approval for the commercial software. With open source/free software, you just download it, and install it. Worse, once you take away that “easy to install ’cause it don’t need budget approval” advantage, open source looses part of it’s edge, and you start to ask, “why don’t we just buy a WebSphere license?”