[witten]

I don't know.. Having worked with the Digium source code before, I almost would rather that they had kept it to themselves. :)

Simply put, I think open source can make sense in products where the benefits (contributions/fixes, goodwill, marketing, increased customer comfort and therefore sales) outweigh any downsides (clones, etc).

One reason I made the post to begin with is because I don't think there are enough examples out there. Not because they can't be successful, but because there is a culture of fear of open source. Fear that your product will be ripped off, fear that you'll lose control of its development, and so on.

In many cases, those fears are unfounded. So I'm trying to develop my particular product as one example of software where open source does make sense. And I hope other small business do so as well.