Free can equal “mon-ey”

Believe it or not, there are still people out there that believe that the Open Source movement will be the death of the closed source software. This is absurd. Think about it people, if a closed source company can not compete with an Open Source product, that is quite frankly their problem. At anytime, that same company can release their code out into the public and allow Open Source developers to take a stab at it. This can actually help their business if they had bothered to really think it through - check this out.

Let’s say that that ABC Inc releases their code for window washing software to the public. The Open Source community gets a hold of it, improves it, creates a slimmer, more streamlined program and issues it to the public at large. The company that originally released it is free to take the new and improved software back to their labs, add some code that alerts users when a window is dirty - thus differentiating it from the program that they took from the Open Source programmers, and then in turn sell it for more that they were able to in the first place!

Why is this so confusing? Open Source can actually help you a great deal with continued development. But no, closed source companies would rather keep it to themselves and then panic when a similar product comes out that is so vastly superior that they believe competing is impossible.