The open-source is a revolution on how companies works with software today. Before open-source, you had to sit in front of your computer and wish for some company to create the software you need and, also, wish to have money to do that because of the software acquisition and technical support as well.
Now, with open-source, the costs were cut. Companies are supporting this initiative because they want independency from the big players of the market. It is all about money.
However I see great development initiatives that goes on without the proper financial support. Some companies use open-source software but they do not pay properly the authors in order to support the initiative for later releases
This is something that I believe that will change in time. Companies will find themselves supporting software authors because they will need technical support. I've already seem some companies doing that and I'm convincing the company where I work to donate money for software authors that wrote programs we use.

One of these days I was thinking on how I use technology in my professional life. I started to realize that all my work related to computer programming uses technologies 10 years old at least.
Then, I decided to go back in time and to stop watching for the new technologies that are in the market today. What I have found is something interesting. I have found that many of "new" stuff are really old stuff with a new beautiful name. I could realize that many features of the operating system I use as my professional development and production platforms are not used, even being available for at least 15 years.
So, I turned my eyes to the past. I could find that the technologies of 10 years ago can be used even today, making costs lower and making data processing power available without having to spend tons of harware. I could realize that we do not master the basics and we want to use the last word in technology. This is something to think about, since this is the middle way to a catastrophic system implementation that will cost a lot in terms of hardware and support to the users. Why the users have to pay so much money for a service that will give them a lot of headaches?