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Open Source Growing At an Exponential Rate
sipmeister writes "Two computer scientists who work for enterprise software giant SAP have shown that open source is growing at an exponential rate. Not only is the code base growing exponentially, but also the number of viable projects. Researchers Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle analyzed the database of open source startup ohloh.net and looked at the last 16 years of growth in open source. They consistently got the best fit for the data using an exponential model. Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace."
You can make up hypothetical situations as much as you like, the fact is that if a library is useful, and there has been a GPLed library available for years, then someone somewhere will be selling a commercial library that does the same thing, which you can use in your proprietary project. Even if that were not true, there is no sense in crying about the fact that you can't profit from other people's software without giving something back.