But something is still going on which very few people in the open source world really understand: a lot of very large public companies, with responsibilities to maximize shareholder value, are investing a lot of money in supporting open source software, usually by paying large teams of programmers to work on it. And that's what the principle of complements explains.[Joel On Software]

Joel's applied the economics to it, but it's been clear for a while that this is exactly what IBM is doing.  If I may be so bold, I'd call it "embrace and extend": embrace the Apache core components and extend them with your own pieces.  IBM's strategy has certainly been working, from what I can see.

In a engineering steering group meeting a couple months ago, shortly after my employer decided to go 100% J2EE for new development, I asked if they would take a position on what the allowable open source licenses were and whether developers would be allowed to contribute source back to projects.  I was told that this was interesting and would be investigated, and the next thing out of anyone's mouth was that we should start exploring patenting some of our inventions.  I think this is what is meant by the expression "talking past each other".  Joel's article reminds me that I need to stir this pot again.

Meeting Ehud Lamm. As Ehud teaches CS at Uni, this time one more topic had to turn up: funniest excuses of students. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric]

This is the subject of some scholarly research.