For more than a year now, there has been an ongoing debate among bloggers and industry observers over one simple question: 'Where are the open source billionaires?' Why have we not seen a GPL Bill Gates or Larry Ellison?

The view here Monday at the CommunityOne conference, an open source gathering in advance of Sun's JavaOne confab, is that the industry is still young and has not yet reached its earnings potential.

Until it does, the open source community is living off mom and dad. In this case, that would be Google, IBM, Sun, HP and other vendors that keep most open source programmers employed. Even Red Hat (NASDAQ:RHAT), the largest of the open source vendors, is dependent on Tier One hardware vendors, particularly IBM (NYSE:IBM). Of course, so was Microsoft in its early days.

Indeed, it's been that way for a while.