Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld reported a great success story that they had getting support from an open source project. It happened that in this case the project was the ASF's Apache 2.0. At the end of his post, was something that I don't see that often:

If you're running the Apache web server (or any of the other projects supported by the Apache Software Foundation), you should really contribute. My C skills would be a burden to the Apache Software Foundation, so I'm sending them a check today.

Meanwhile Tim Oren is musing on open source:

How does a commercial interest align itself successfully with the opinion leaders and developers who make open source more than another doomed commercial 'alliance'?

Pointing back to my question about how to promote open source projects, I'd also ask how predictable the process can be made from the point of the view of the customers, given its inherent component of chaos (or emergent order if you prefer.)

These questions are some of the big challenges facing commercial interests and the open source community. What Chad Dickerson did is great -- a thank you check is always appreciated. But we in the open source community need to think about how to answer Tim's questions. Is there a way for commercial interests to deal directly with individuals or groups of individuals in a way that produces predictability / stability, without killing the open source spirit?