Dare Obasanjo captures the essence of the divide in open source:

When it comes to the financial benefits of Open Source, you need to look at two perspectives. The perspective of the software vendor (the producer) and the perspective of the software customer (the consumer). A key benefit of Open Source/Free Software to software consumers is that it tends to drive the price of the software to zero. On the other hand, although software producers like Sun Microsystems spend money to produce the software they cannot directly recoup that investment by charging for the software. Thus if you are a consumer of software, it is clear why Open Source is great for your bottom line. On the flip side, it isn't so clear if your primary business is producing software.

Which is exactly right, and, IMHO, it's a large part of the reason that Sun is laying people off. If you give stuff away, it's very hard to derive revenue from it - unless your primary business isn't driven by direct software (Google) - then this is fine, and - in fact - it gives you a great weapon to beat other companies with. You'll even get to look like the "good guys" fighting against the "evils of proprietary software".

Meanwhile, every company in that position plays an interesting game around proprietary software:

This is why you'll never find a Subversion source repository on http://code.google.com with the source code behind Google's AdSense or Adwords products or the current algorithms that power their search engine. Instead you will find Google supporting and releasing lots of Open Source software that is tangential its core business while keeping the software that actually makes them money proprietary.

I've always found it amazing that people will cheer about Eclipse (a weapon IBM used to drive competing Java IDE vendors out of business), while simultaneously yelling about how evil MS was with giving away IE. sure, Eclipse is open software, and IE isn't. The business effect of both things was identical though; they came from a large vendor and were used to drive small vendors out of the field.

Sometimes, the levels of cognitive dissonance on this amaze me.