Despite being a hub of open source thinkers and development, open source hasn’t created the economic splash Portland might have hoped for.

 None of the world’s leading for-profit open-source software companies—Red Hat, Black Duck, Canonical—is headquartered here. The Open Source Development Lab, a Beaverton nonprofit, merged with the Linux Foundation in 2007 and moved to San Francisco. That loss still stings, as does the collapse in 2006 of an effort to fund an economic development center for open-source technology.

“You hear people say, ‘Go big or go home,’” says Stuart Cohen, formerly of the Open Source Development Lab. “And we have a tendency not to go big. We’re not doing it bigger, faster, stronger than other places, even though they’re our ideas.”

Read more in Willamette Week.