Let me start off by saying that I don't have anything against OSS per se, I certainly spend a lot of my time contributing to the community through user groups, presentations, articles, and (hopefully) this blog, but as a person who gets paid to develop software I worry about the market deciding that they will only use OSS and I will have to find a new way to feed my family. The success of Red Hat as a company has certainly caused me some worry. When I see articles like the one here on Slashdot that says a successful OSS project has decided to close its source to keep its competitors from taking the code, repackaging it, and reselling it, it gives me hope that I will still have a job long into the future.

I think there is defenitly a place for both closed and open source development in our world. It just may take a while longer to figure out what people are passionate enough to work on for free and what things take some money to make them worth developing. From the article it seems that this particular product hasn't had a lot of community development for a while. I am curious if most OSS projects, like TV shows and on-line games, follow a pattern of a lot of activity and energy at first to get the "fun" stuff done. Later, issues of maintenance and boring features come up and people start to go off in search of something more fun and fulfilling to do until only the truly devoted people and those who still have some motivation (make money, kill competition, promised to do something and can't figure a good way to back out, etc.) are left around? I don't have any evidence either way on this, just a question I thought of.