Ted Ts'o, the Chief Platform Strategist of the Linux Foundation, has posted two interesting blog postings with his thoughts about organic vs. non-organic open source software. In non-organic projects all or nearly all of the developers are employed by one company whereas organic projects consist of a development community in which a lot of different people participate. An alternative explanation would be to say that organic projects are those with an open source development community whereas non-organic projects have an open source license but are dominated by a single company. Ts'o discusses this distinction in his blog and why it makes sense to draw a distinction between the two.
Blog 1: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/24/organic-vs-non-organic-open-source/
Blog 2: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/26/organic-vs-non-organic-open-sourc...