I come across the word at least 100 times in a day. But when ever i hear the word, i tend to think weather the word is used in the right tense as well as meaning. It has been around on behalf of more than a decade. People who trust in free software are not on behalf of the term Open Source. Still they are right in a way. People talk very serious business opt on behalf of tidy proprietary techniques. But days have altered given that technology requirements have more leverage in terms of choices as well as cost effectiveness. The java community has taken this word as a powerful sword to win business which i feel is pretty healthy. As far as i am concerned, i trust in healthy business ecosystem as well as how ever you can it, either as Open Source or open Standard or Open Thoughts etc.., At the end of the day what matters to me is the society as well as healthy ecosystem.
The world can't reside pure capitalistic (recent markets slide shows that quite well) not deep routed communism too. Both the concepts are quite solid. Agreed. They are pillars. But now there's not so much space left in this world to build pillars which doesn’t helps in easy movement of commodities.  So when we endeavour to stand in between the two concepts, we are referred to as people who don’t have fixed or concrete stand on anything but safety. But what happened to both these giant concepts in recent days. One proved quite revolutionary (nothing much more than that)and the other one took in competition which has tendency to blow the society when at a saturation mark.
The third concept of socialism comes to rescue when both other parties comes to a halt as well as become speechless. It’s pretty simple as well as designed to cater more choices. Live as well as let live. Competition is good as well as healthy competition is the way to go. Strong acceptation survives long. Now to the point, do we take that Open Source has taken some sort of socialistic figure? I would just like to leave this question un-answered on behalf of the readers. Little discomfort with the term is the thin line it’s made of.
There are numerous successful case studies. And this is a very important Era of not only technology development but also the business developments which ultimately generates money to feed the technicians. I feel Open Source caters to both the segments (quite well pinned together) with ease as well as efficiency.
Few Popular Open Source strategies:
Spring Framework
Apache
JBOSS