Value Of Open Source

There is a good article on Reuters where Monty Widenius talks about Oracle and MySQL. There is a quote that caught my attention:

Widenius said that while the code could be easily copied, the main problem was the ecosystem around MySQL — companies making business from it, developing it and using it. “If it would be easy to fork (copy) it, no-one would have paid a billion dollars for it.”

It isn’t a revolutionary concept. However, it illustrates the point that the real value of Open Source projects is not the code, but the community and ecosystem around the project. Growing the community and eco-system should be the primary function of a company that “owns” an open source project, since that is where the long-term value is. This in turn drives adoption and revenues.