Or look at the situation another way. In the Open/Free software community there are a lot of true believers in a social mission for software. They seem to produce and maintain software for non-monetary reasons. In the business world there are a lot of people committed to paying their suppliers the least possible amount for the supplies that they need to operate their business. Open/Free software costs less than commercial software. Some businesses will move to using Open/Free software. They will reduce their cost structure. They will become more competitive in their respective industries because of their lower cost structure. The customer base of commercial software enterprises will wither and die. (Or maybe not die, just be bought out by a competitor with a lower cost structure.) Alternatively, commercial software houses might retool as suppliers of IT staffing and management for corporations. But they will give up on their licensed software business because they can't make money at it in the face of GNU/Linux competition.
Prior to actually getting out of the business, they will give all sorts of self serving arguments as to why they are having trouble, but the truth is that the Open/Free software community doesn't need their services at the prices that they need to charge.
Certainly there exists commercial, proprietary software today which tomorrow will be replaced - at least sufficiently replaced - and will no longer be profitable to produce.
But unless you are making your software available under a license which prohibits or restricts commercial use, requires release of modified source as a condition to modified distribution, or requires release of modified source as a condition to even modification without redistribution, then it is difficult to see how your Free/Open development is doing anything to erode the future of proprietary software.
Proprietary software developers today can develop and market their software for and on more platforms than ever before, and increasingly they can acquire high quality tools, and build upon powerful frameworks and libraries for free and without giving back to the community.
But even _if_ Free/Open software development is exhausting the set of unsolved technological/software problems this means very little in an economic environment where producers thrive at least as greatly creating and marketing new _problems_, as they do solving legitimate ones.
--dircha
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