[malchow]

"Insanity?" That's an ideological statement, but it doesn't really hold up to the facts, I think. It has always struck me that the gravamen of the Open Source movement has been to accelerate the improvement of important common libraries by enabling anyone to view and evolve source code, with the 'evolution' taking either the free or a commercial license. The simple fact is that, over the last few decades, there have been good and bad improvements under open licenses and good and bad improvements under commercial licenses. It's the possibility of improvement that is important.

I might go even further, and suggest that if one had to parcel the value created by open source software into two buckets, the one being value created by reason of transparent source code, and the other being value created by reason of no-cost source, the majority of the marginal value creation will have been because of the former, not the latter.