Open source is creeping through middleware, turning it into a profit-less commodity and forcing technology companies to seek value further up the food chain, according to two leading open source experts.

But they warn that Microsoft understands this better than the open source community and is focusing on controlling the value points, with .Net a part of this strategy.

Speaking at the LinuxExpo in Birmingham last week, Tim O'Reilly, president of open source publisher O'Reilly & Associates, explained that the value in an application is in the data and the customer interactions.

As well as Linux, the open source Apache web server had removed a web server market and MySQL threatened to do the same for databases, according to O'Reilly.

"There's a failure to understand the paradigm shift in the Linux community," he said. "The killer applications are Google, Yahoo and Amazon on Linux. User-friendly applications [which] everyone uses.

"If you take a programmer out, software still runs. But Google with no people soon runs down. So eBay makes more money than Red Hat."

But O'Reilly warned that Microsoft, although threatened by open source, is aware that nobody yet owns the internet and is looking for the 'lock-in' points by which it could possess the value.

For example, Microsoft's purchase of MapQuest is an indication that it wants to own the location-based data market, according to O'Reilly.

Jon 'Maddog' Hall, president of Linux International, who spoke at the same event, insisted that this is why .Net is so important to Microsoft.

"The latest thing is, of course, .Net. It is moving up the food chain. If [Microsoft] gets everyone programming in .Net it doesn't really care whether .Net is running over Linux," he told vnunet.com.

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