E,
Interesting questions that only time will tell, but for the sake of discussion here are my thoughts.
...net individual gain... Major hw vendors (Creative, Ninvidia, Matrox, Aureal, others) are releasing open source drivers for their products and more importantly the hardware specs, this will not only benefit Linux but other development efforts as well (BE OS, XFree86, etc.). This frees up these companies from sole development responibilities and brings the possibility of more wide spread use of these products, good for hardware companies.
What about independent developers? Will they continue to develop for free? I believe both yes (development in the open-Source community has several benefits, to develop is to learn valuable skills, to increase stature, both increase a developers earning potential and range of job posibilities) and more and more Open-Source developers will be rewarded in a bounty style for work done. I believe there is a synergistic loop developing that will outpace closed source proprietary development. I like morphing to, but I think the morphing process will happen more to the commercial software industry than the OpenSource community. I think allot of "projects" or "software" that is viewed as "commercial OpenSource" will in fact be done by traditionally "commercial" developers, and as such will represent more of a morphing of the commercial-developers toward OpenSource-Free software than a commercialization of the OpenSource Community.
E, I personally believe that the philosophy of the OpenSource/FreeSoftware movement is the vanguard of a greater social shift that will ultimately extend far beyond the software industry. A shift fueled by the possibilities of the 'Net and people's long frustrated desires. But I am in danger of a verrryyy long digression :) so I will leave it here.
mowa |
