Can Open Source and Commercial Software Coexist?

morrison asks: "In recent years, the Open-Source movement has increased dramatically. Harnessing the power of thousands of developers and testers has proven successful, to varying degrees, in developing operating systems, graphics applications, and web tools, including Linux, POV-Ray, Blender, Gimp, and Apache. In a SIGGRAPH 2005 discussion panel, the questions will be raised as to whether the open-source model is relevant and useful to the graphics community. Does the model of proprietary application research, development, and usage serve the industry better? Or will commercial facilities continue to primarily choose off-the-shelf solutions? Can all models work together? As a large portion of the Slashdot and Open Source community will be at SIGGRAPH, I'd really like to hear some moderated arguments beforehand before stepping up to the microphone."

Comments

Open source business model

[Anonymous Coward]

The open source business model of "release the source and make money off the support" only works if .. well .. the software sucks.

Not saying Op Src itself as a concept is bad though, just aware of companies claiming this biz model ..not to name any names. Agree?

Sorry mods, I cant be a troll if i'm making a valid point.

Re:Reality Check

[mpapet]

Reality Check:
These OSes are closed systems where no new software can be introduced without the blessing of the distro maintainers.

Uhhh, not true. In apt, I add another source to /etc/sources.list. I've done it quite successfully and I'm no genius. I can report that I benefitted from this endeavor many times over. Now, getting your project into a distro's official repository probably takes much longer than you have been willing to commit.

These OSes are closed systems where no new software can be introduced without the blessing of the distro maintainers.

Uhh, wrong again. Again, I'm no genius but I figured out make, make install when there was no binary I couldn't get from different apt-sources.

I'll be glad to help you through your issues because it sounds like I've been there and done that and you may benefit from my experience.