It is important to note that some of the big management vendors actually understand the role of open source and embrace it. Recently William Hurley (full disclosure thats me), Mark Hinkle, Ethan Galstad, Mike Erwin, Jamie Cameron, and Bill Karpovich formed the Open Management Consortium. Today BMC stepped forward in support of the effort. More importantly, Tom Bishop (the CTO at BMC) made some very good observations about the roles and relations of open source Vs. proprietary management companies. You can learn more about the Open Management Consortium and read BMCs response here on the website at: http://openmanagement.org/ I would personally welcome each of you to post a reply as we are very interested in developing the OMC based on direct feedback from the community.

Agreed -- thanks for the comment, William. The obvious other vendor to point to that really "gets" open source is IBM. No other systems vendor played a bigger role in ushering Linux into mainstream use. Then you look at IBM's steady contributions to areas like open source Grid computing (like the Globus Toolkit), and it's clear that IBM is wholeheartedly bringing the benefits of open source-based network and systems management approaches into consideration for its Tivoli product lines. It's great for the customers that the big management vendors get that open source is disrupting the old ways of how management solutions are packaged up and sold.