[vacri]

> It sucks because someone who writes an amazing tool still has to come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it.

However, selling the software itself means you have to engage in a robust licensing system to defeat the pirates, which is no trivial feat (even mighty Adobe went online-as-a-service because they couldn't beat the pirates).

[pfranz]

Well, I think you get around that by making a service-based company instead of a software-based company--that's completely separate from open source vs closed source. Unfortunately, not all businesses can be structured like that.