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Is Open Source Software a Race To Zero?
gozunda writes "My company is an open source software vendor/developer. We maintain a popular open source project and keep ourselves afloat by producing commercial products derived from or extending the value of the core project. Over time we've seen our business model eroding as other open source projects produce free versions of the same extensions and utilities that are our bread and butter. Something that was worth $5K last year is suddenly worth $0 because the free version is just as good as the paid. This same cycle is obviously having an impact on pure-play commercial software vendors. Is open source ultimately a race to zero? In ten years will there be any cost associated with commodity (non-custom) software? If not, will there still be a 'software industry' as it exists today, or will software simply be a by-product of the operation of other industries? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? As a professional developer, do I need to fear this or feed it?"
Yes, and there's nothing new with that.
Just because your software is open source doesn't mean that you get to sit on your duff and collect money off your paid extensions in perpituity. Just like any other software company, if you want to keep food on your metaphorical table, you've got to continue to innovate and improve. Otherwise, just like any other software company, your competitors (in this case, open source develoeprs) will eat your metaphorical lunch.
For what it's worth, though, nothing would be different if your software were closed source, except that your user base would probably be smaller and, depending on how necessary your software is, open source competitors would be even more eager to push you out.
Personally I don't see there being a lot of value in paying for new versions of spreadsheets and word processors over and over again. There's not much, to me anyway, that's been added in the past 10 years. It keeps M$'s revenue stream high but is there value to me?
If software became more about producing new product instead of reworking the same old stuff in the language of the month I would be happy and I think there would be just as many jobs.
That's all strictly opinion, with no facts to support it.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
You are correct with the race to zero when you talk about developed code... The more time that goes by, the more it will erode existing code bases.
As far how to deal with it... Change your business strategy to help your users more. Meaning, instead of selling code, consider working on a support model where you offer support and monitoring services to your user base. Also, another good strategy is a hosted approach. Meaning, maybe you can offer connectivity to your users...
In the long-term there is little doubt in my mind that that proprietary software will be mostly obselete for a number of reasons. First is certainly cost, but security and quality are good other reasons. As a comany you can either change or die. The choice is yours..
The problem is OSS businesses are doing things the wrong way. Rather than do it Red Hat's and some business's way of adding in features in the community version they instead make the community version spartan and the paid one with support oozing with features, naturally this makes it a great target for some weekend coder to take that version and reverse-engineer or just get the source of the paid version and add it to the free version. Paid versions = Stable versions, community versions = unstable versions. Keep that in mind and your business will not have the community rebelling and forking your project every other month.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The world provides no guarantee that you can forever be profitable at the thing you currently make money on.
Many years ago, people spent their lives painstakingly copying books. Today, we have printers that can do the same thing at a tiny, miniscule fraction of the cost.
More recently, people made money doing repetitive calculations, over and over again, and compiling the results into books. Now, obviously, computers can do it faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
Perhaps you're used to writing operating systems for a living. Well, operating systems are now valuable enough that people are willing to spend effort to make them free - CEOs realized, hey, I *could* spend $100,000 on licenses of an operating system. Or, I could spend the equivalent amount of money by taking an existing operating system and improving it for me . . . and for all future users . . . and then not have to spend $100,000 on next year's licenses, but instead just spend a relatively tiny amount of money maintaining our local patches.
And, hell, I could submit those to the central repository too. And now they'll maintain it for us.
Here's what it all comes down to. The core software in a computer is now too important to pay for. If you pay for it once, that implies you can be asked to pay for it again . . . and again, and again, and again . . . and if it's that important, you may simply have no choice. You don't want to contract out the necessities to someone who can withhold them on a whim - you want them available to you, for free, whenever you desire.
I don't know about you, but if I had to pay some dude $50 every time I wanted to flush my toilet, I'd be buying my own toilet with free flushes pretty damn fast. And, at the risk of stretching the analogy, I think people are tired of putting up with Microsoft's - or any other large company's - shit.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Honestly,
the way to go is to have it be open source, and then your company should be willing to 'contract out' and do customizations on demand for their clients. I do a lot of customization of my company's software (nobody likes it 100% out of the box, no software ever does things just the way the client wants). If your company charges for customizations, then you build up a base of customizations. If you find that 20% of your customer base wants the same customization, just incorporate it into the build. If it's only 1 customer, it's not worth including. Think of it as sort of a Darwin inspired method of evolving your application. Those changes that are needed bring in money, and the more money brought in the more likely a change get's added to the base code. Then more customization requests come in, and the cycle repeats. Unlike M$ where M$ decides what you want and then rams it down your throat with a dirty toilet plunger (sorry, all I can think of to equate to Vista).
"My company is an open source software vendor/developer. We maintain a popular open source project and keep ourselves afloat by producing commercial products derived from or extending the value of the core project."
If I understand this correctly I think the business model is what would keep me away in the first place.
I am happy for "the same code base" to be available gratis with no pro support or for a fee with pro support, or free with paid pro support available.
But since one of motivations for operating in the Free software realm is to get myself out from under the vendor lock in problem, your business model makes me mistrust you. And note that this is not a case of wanting everything gratis as there is a situation I know of now where we cannot consider moving to the Free software option because currently there is a Free software option but it does not have the needed paid for support option at a competitive price that we are aware of.
I still think there be to be some future for industry association funded software development and support. But perhaps I am way off base on this as it has seemed obvious to me for years and I have seen no move towards this in all that time.
Now, if the world can get all to software it could need "developed" gratis by people who get a kick out of it so much the better but somehow I think that people will be able to get paid to develop software for a good long time to come. Getting paid for a monopoly on producing and distributing copies of software is another matter.
all the best,
drew
--
http://zotz.kompoz.com/
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
And since the base is open, the investment in time required to make a competitive product is just the extension itself. Usually something a motivated user can and will do.
And no, it's not a bad thing. But it does mean a changing business model. I really don't think there will be much in the way of pure play software businesses in the future. I also think the "support" model is a mirage.
Software will be what it has always been for me and many others... a necessary component of a larger system or product that does have a barrier to entry (for me, that's embedded systems).
How many of you have been in the situation where you had to productize software and support a family based on this? It's hard. It's a lot harder than than simply checking features into an OSS project.
Speaking as someone who was a partner in a non FOSS startup company (successful), someone who has an a Cs degree and an MBA, and someone who has actually researched OSS business models, it is my opinion that FOSS projects drive down the demand for software as a product faster than innovators can productize. FOSS also creates the expectation that software should just be free. People don't want to pay for Microsoft or for whatever you are building. And FOSS is trans-national. FOSS makes it incredibly easy to outsource high paying US software jobs to developing nations that charge 1/3 the salary. This again makes it cheaper for the consumer but ultimately discourages developers from innovating based on the profit motive.
FOSS is an incredibly powerful and disruptive force in the high tech global economy. But it's unfortunate that FOSS is actually eroding the future jobs of the developers who contribute to it. Think ahead 20 or 30 years. Do you want to be trying to support a family, paying a mortgage, putting several kids through college while competing against salaries of developers in India, China, Vietnam, etc while they provide cheap services based on FOSS? An unhappy but highly likely scenario.
It does seem economically that FOSS can encourage a race to the bottom of software develop salaries in developed countries.
except the last stage never happens. As companies don't like change, they can't see their software is worth less over time.
Supply and demand fails for software as the cost of one copy isn't very different than a million copies. Unlike dell for each unit sold costs money to make, Software only costs you once to make.
The only thing that makes software less valuable is a better version.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
One of the big keys to making money off of software is specialization. Great versions of most any type of general program can be found in open source form. However, projects that develop for very specific needs of many different industries are often perpetually stuck at a fledgling stage. When you address the very specific needs of a certain type of user, it is easy to find markets that can be profitable for commercial software, while at the same time not being widely interesting enough to be addressed by the open source community.
Well, some of this is inevitable, and something you can't change. People are spending time writing free software, and it will undercut commercial software... and you can't stop these people. The fundamental problem is pretty much exactly as MS says it. A commercial software is written, extensive R&D is done on the target market in order to design it, it's released, and a year later somebody else has simply copied the idea. It goes to show that the SOFTWARE isn't the important part there. It's the IDEA. This is why MS makes claims about innovation all the time. Most of the industry already knows this, and their solution is simple: protect the idea. Patents. And you know what? I can't think of any better idea. The alternative is to let it continue. Maybe that is an alternative. The best we can do then is guess about the future... will people just stop investing in R&D? I don't know for sure. And if you're idealogically against patents for some reason, well... I can't help you! There are some people ideaologically against private property ownership at all. I can't help them either. =)
Really, I'm surprised you still selling opensource solutions without being driven out of the market.
I didn't say you should switch to closesource. My friends' companies develop with, on, from opensource projects and still make profit with them. Why? Because they know how to keep up with the market.
They sell Appliances, like those CISCO routers and Checkpoint firewall, but perform some other functions like MTA, Virus scanner, load balancers, etc.. Appliances with opensource elements in them, such that they can be trademarked and brand-protected, can be maintained, without paying huge royalty. Above all, you can still contribute opensource projects back to the community, and keep it growing.
This is just one example to make use of opensource projects. Honestly I don't really know your business so I don't have further suggestion for you. But I'm very sure the problem doesn't lie in adopting opensource projects. Someone else makes money with them, if you can't, don't blame opensource projects, blame your marketing strategy.
Now go round the hardware store. In ours there are several kinds of push fit and screw fit plumbing. The pipe is plastic, you cut it with a simple little tool. I recently had to replace the water softener and the new one had different plumbing. It took me nearly half an hour to put in four bends and a few joints.
That's the race for the bottom. Basic plumbing skills now take a day to acquire and, by following the instructions, you can do a safe job. But plumbers are still employed. I'm not about to service my boiler, or install a bath. I have more sense than to try to put in an oil tank and all the safety equipment, following all the codes.
It's like that with software. It is not a race for the bottom, it is called progress. An SMTP server is now a basic piece of kit. The learning curve for spreadsheet design is, basically, over. Unlike the so-called creative arts, engineering does not recognise the idea that somebody should be rewarded forever for a one-off contribution. In a knowledge society, new knowledge has value but old knowledge is free.
Eventually, kicking and screaming, I expect we will get Open Source Law, and so-called lawyers will no longer be able to charge excessively for basic legal advice in simple cases. But specialist lawyers and the Supreme Court will still be needed, because there will still be hard cases. The same should really apply to all professions. And if you want a guaranteed source of income, make something essential that wears out. Grow food, make clothes or shoes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Can I just say that as a user the "survive on service" model makes me uncomfortable. We're disencentivizing making robust, easy-to-use software in exchange for one that requires some degree of brokenness to survive. I'd rather pay someone for their software than being stuck with their services because their software is somehow unintelligible.
The ______ Agenda
The benefit of OSS is that you can establish and grow a base very quickly. Successful OSS companies leverage the fact that people can download and try their s/w on their own timeline. You leverage that fact as the main marketing tool, with people posting to /. and writing up in trade rags about this cool new project to check out.
Once the s/w gets a footprint with the costumer, they recognize the value of it and now want customizations and/or support because the s/w has VALUE only after they've played with it.
The model you are proposing is about increasing VALUE only after they have bought into the core product.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
As is often the case...it depends.
If you are working on software that's of interest to developers, someone who can will almost certainly build a FOSS version of it rather than pay you. With a few very notable exceptions, FOSS development is essentially self-serving. On the other hand, if your product is aimed at a non-techie audience, it's unlikely to stimulate FOSS competition.
The Gimp is an excellent example. It tends to be compared to Photoshop, but the comparison is unfair. Photoshop is a heavily-funded complex product aimed at a community that uses computers as tools and has no interest in how those tools come into being; it has nothing to fear from FOSS. In terms of its capabilities, The Gimp has yet to reach the level of my five-year-old version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and its features curve is leveling off. It's fairly evident that The Gimp has reached a point where it's good enough for the developers and their friends. They may add a few features for the fun of meeting the challenge, but I don't see myself switching from Paint Shop to The Gimp any time soon, or ever.
There will always be a commercial software market, but not for development tools, operating systems, or technical utilities. The big players will continue to fund development of open software that will allow them to compete with Microsoft, and the occasional labor of love will crop up. For the rest, it's either pay for it, or no one will build it.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Sun, IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft and thousands of consulting firms (big and small) make LOTS of money by giving away free software.
You use that free software to sell SCARCE resources: services (business analysis, custom programming, expert installation, production support, training, etc...), hardware, non-free software, etc...
They hypothetical programmer loses their house because you believe they simply write software, give it away for free, and collect a paycheck. The reality is that the real OSS programmers are much smarter than that. The software is only a PART of their business model. It is a sales and marketing tool, and an effective one at that!
If you can only see the "OSS programmers don't make any money", then you should not consider running a s/w company, especially one that would leverage an OSS model. There is WAY more to running a s/w company than creating software. You stick to the cubicles and whiteboards, let non-myopic people run the business.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Unfortunately, yes. And that is because Geeks and Nerds don't interact with real life. They are not street-smart, don't know the value of money, or bills, and basically don't know how to behave in a society. That's why they are picked on at schools and can't pick up girls.
Now, not knowing anything about business or real life or money, they have decided that it is a good idea to work for free.
That is what is wrong with the software industry today and why it isn't a good business to be in. The software business is basically an organization run by geeks and nerds, and because they don't really know anything about real world, money or business - this is the wrong place to be.
Show this comment to your president and CEO and tell them to bail out, and let geeks starve themselves with this "open source", free stuff and then come back once the nerds have died off from hunger and loneliness.
Well, MS (and others, of course) has amply shown that you can do that also if your application is not OSS. What was your point, exactly?
"The world provides no guarantee that you can forever be profitable at the thing you currently make money on."
I suspect the issue isn't perpetual income but is it fair competition? Are the rules that OSS plays by fair to only a minority?
I'm curious what universe you live where the notion of "fair" has anything to do with surviving - whether as an organism or a company. Where I'm from the world has always been a cold, heartless bitch when it comes to any competition other than friendly games.
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
OSX and Linux started around the same time in terms of popularity and market share. Yet nearly 10 years later RedHat is still a peanut gallery while Apple is a powerhouse.
You might be able to say that in the desktop market, but the exact opposite is true in the server market.
From what I've observed over the years, OSS works great on the server/enterprise side, where there is significant money to be made in support services. On the other hand, end-users don't buy support contracts, leaving almost no money to be made there to pay developers, so closed source wins.
And yet Red Hat's profit and revenue keep on growing.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Don't forget file format lock-in and network effects.
If you're the only one who can make a 100% compatible word processor ... and everyone uses that file format ... then you can do just about whatever you want. As long as the damage you are causing to your customers is less than the cost of them migrating (and causing problems with THEIR suppliers and customers).
That's why there was such a big push for ODF. Once the file format is standardized, ANYONE can write a word processor and compete on quality and support instead of lock-in.
Effectively driving the cost of word processors down to zero.
"Yes, but then you won't be building a community because you've already decided that the s/w you make "doesn't need to be fantastic".
No organization with that mindset is going to build a thriving OSS community."
The goal of a business is to make money, not create "a thriving OSS community". A large community can help, but it many cases it just works against you as a company. This is because many of the same people that are using your product have the ability to fork it and compete with you.
OSS communities also have a history of containing people that not only will not pay for your software, but are against paying for software in general. Strike #2.
"Once the s/w gets a footprint with the costumer, they recognize the value of it and now want customizations and/or support because the s/w has VALUE only after they've played with it."
Support and custom jobs are a nightmare. I would much rather sell licenses to a proprietary application than become a glorified freelancer. This is why OSS businessmen have a free, open source version, and an enterprise version. They use the free version as a sort of a freeware/trial for the large, enterprise version.
If you think of the programmer as a creative artist (actually, in many ways there's more truth to this than seeing them as engineers) then this is fully justified. If you are a person who pimps^Wcontrols a rock musician, then the government will try to guarantee you an income even when your product is becoming completely outdated (like 70 years!). If you have a bunch of keyboard monkey slaves, you are expected to live in a competitive market. Nobody goes around changing the law to guarantee you money.
I think almost anybody reasonable can see how that is unfair. What we need is a PIAA which arranges guaranteed incomes for people who have once employed a programmer (as long as they don't actually program or do anything useful themselves). The BSA are a bunch of useless wimps.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
There's no future in being a commercial developer because someone else will do the same thing, for free. Now, I can understand the positive side of this, and I will say that software now is 'better' than it ever has been.
But it has destroyed a lot of job opportunities. Someone with my level of skills could, 20 years ago, work on the next big OS or database or something, and make a living at it. Now I'm relegated to making web apps. Why? Because all of the big jobs have already been done, and there's no incentive to compete when the net value of the market is zero. The older Linux and BSD programmers made out pretty well since they got into the game early, but there's no way for a programmer to started in these areas anymore. The amount of work that goes into getting started on, say, Linux kernel development, is beyond what can be done in your spare time.
Am I lamenting the fall of proprietary software? Only indirectly. I'm more upset that there's not as many opportunities to do __interesting__ work because of open source.
I heard Stallman address this topic and I though he was very realistic about it. Someone from the audience asked him something like "How can I develop Free Software and have a house?" and his response was something like that it was not always easy to do the right thing and that you have to make choices.
I found his response quite sobering. You can agree or disagree with this stance, but I don't think you can say that he's trying to sell anyone a bill of goods.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
There is no market for selling a commodity with a zero cost of production
Nintendo would beg to differ.
This is something which seems to be better understood in Europe instead of the US. In the US OSS-companies are trying to sell OSS in a proriatary/shrinkwrapped way, just like the mentioned company.
What you should be doing is sell development services, so someone needs something build, build what they need and atleast when you base it off an existing OSS project you will need to use a OSS-license for it. It could also be requested by the client that it have a OSS-license, so he/she can take the source code somewhere else when the two parties part.
Or build webbases applications and also sell hosting or something.
New things are always on the horizon
Every product or service is in a race towards the minimum price at which it can be physically produced and delivered (price including any available manpower and start-up capital needed).
Every stand-alone software product only has value until its function and value can be reproduced or supplanted (by patent expiration, stolen trade secrets, the time it takes to reinvent or develop from scratch, the time it takes to equal the original products reputation, the time it takes competitors to make/build/package your open source, etc.) To have a non-zero revenue window, you need to make sure the time you offer something unique is non-zero.
Of course, humans are stupid, and this allows you to use their lack of information to create some additional value. If potential customers think your brand name implies something better than the identical bits under some other name (e.g. Coke vs. generic cola), then you might be able to maintain a non-zero pricing.
IMHO. YMMV.
There have been many interesting points of view raised here. The concensus seems to be that FOSS is a race to Zero, and I agree. I also think that this is a good thing. I recall some years ago there was a piece of commercial software around called "Notepad Plus", and more recently another one which did source highliting and all kinds of nice stuff. I can't remember the name of that one, but it had a frog for it's icon. Now, there's SciTE, which is absolutely fantastic. Since discovering SciTE I haven't looked back. This is an example of the 'race to zero' you're talking about. I'm a software developer, and more recently I've become a bit of a FOSS zealot - I've contributed a couple of things to FOSS projects, but not much yet. The way I look at it, when you contribute to an OSS project you're giving something back, but if you use OSS then your contribution is very likely to be a very small percentage of the total amount of work you benefit from. and Free software works for everybody's benefit, except perhaps the developer. Alot of people seem to think that you have to shift from doing software development to doing development and support if you want to stay solvent in the coming world where all software is FOSS. but I disagree. There are people (like me!) who despise doing support, and would much prefer to write documentation and simply deal with very high level "This has been confirmed as a bug" type stuff rather than providing support, so not everybody is going to find this shift in emphasis away from development to be attractive. Secondly, A position like mine will never go away. I work in a non-IT office, writing and supporting code which is very specific to the office I'm working in - this stuff will pretty much never be replaced by FOSS, regardless of what innovative software somebody comes up with. I'll still be needed to do all the stuff which is very specific to my office, even if commercial software has gone the way of the dodo. Thirdly, there will still be a requirement for innovation and development, even after all software hits $0, there will still be companies who need things done. For example, IBM might want a capability added to a filesystem or a database, and the best way to achieve that will be to hire a bunch of people to do it. So perhaps software will be driven by what business wants rather than what some marketing team thinks the consumer wants, but I really don't think that the job of the software developer is going to go away any time soon.
The short answer: Yes. It is a "race to 0" if you will.
The longer version is that there has always been something suspect in property rights, at least as implemented in modern society. Yes, yes, bloody communism, I know; let's get past that one, OK? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to own our own houses or cars or whatever, or benefit from our own efforts - that is and has always been the pipe dreams of people with too much time on their hands. Communism, in the essence, has always been about finding a fair balance between the amount of work you put in and the benefit you get out. If you would care to check it, it is all there, even in Marx' works - he talks about the means of production, in a context where a tiny upper class of people who had mostly inherited their wealth, lived as parasites on the ever more extreme exploitation of a working class. Who knows what he would have come up with in this day and age? But he would probably have approved of the open source idea.
The brilliance of OSS stems from the fact that it builds on the same principles as scientific research and publication: the free exchange of ideas amongst peers, which allows everybody to make improvements. The only criterium for success is whether it is received well and gets used by the community. The absurdity of property rights is never more obvious than when it comes to the concept of intellectual property; we have seen over and over how new ideas come, not from one unique person, but from many sources at once. Take the theory of evolution - Darwin got his name on it because he managed to publish it first in the place where it mattered at the time, but he wasn't the only one who has that idea; it had been bubbling in the scientific community for years - if he or Wallace hadn't come up with it, somebody else would soon after.
Software is just another example of ideas written down - you can of course refuse to let others see how you did it and treat it as your property, but as OSS shows, it is never that difficult to come up with that very same idea - and the cooperation of OSS means that it will eventually become better than the closed source version. So, how to make money from your work? Well, how does any craftsman make money? By making a product and selling it. But once it's been sold he has to make another. When you make a living from your ideas, you are in the same boat as scientists and artists - those that do it only for the money are at best mediocre and most of them only just scrape along, which I think is fair enough. If you do it because you really love doing it, you are either good enough that you can make a living, or you have a day job that gives you enough to finance your real interest.
That's the way it is, and the way it should be. Don't whine about it, or it will be my turn to call you names.
But it will filter down, people want their home computers to run the same as they have at work, so the more OSS takes off in large businesses the more it will filter down to home users..
[citation needed]
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
There are people writing here who need to get out from behind their monitors and look at the real world. The modern economy does not require something to be manufactured to have a value. As we now know, banks have been selling promises and shares for years. And ultimately, selling promises of promises...but that is another debate.
Anyway, the point is that anything can be sold if it has perceived value to someone - it doesn't need a manufacturing cost. Hence, the software market does exist. What's more, it can and will continue as a market to sell a license. Don't forget, you don't buy software, you buy a license to operate it.
Now Open Source is great and useful to us all, but it does take time (==money) to develop. Where does that come from? Lots of people have pointed out how IBM and Sun are embracing Open Source. Of course they do - but their primary business is to sell hardware. IBM and Sun used to have a model of sell you a computer with just their software. The idea that the same OS could run on any hardware just didn't exist. I'm sure if IBM/Sun have their way, they'd go back to that.
Then we have the Open Source software companies. They make money by adding closed/proprietary extensions or services to make it useful. Then after a few years they give that bit away and build something new. In other words, they're only Open Source when it suits them. There's nothing wrong with this from a business point-of-view. It makes good economic sense. It isn't a moral high ground or the idea that software isn't real and shouldn't be paid for. It's simple, good old fashioned - I have something you want, please pay me, business.
The problem for the original poster is that because they are basing part of their business on Open Source, they cannot really go after anyone when they copy their proprietary bits, making them valueless. You've got two options: 1. Expand your portfolio, 2. Go closed, 3. Make hardware. Expansion is not a long term solution - you will need to add knowledge to your company to expand your product range, which means more people - unfortunately, you need greater sales to afford to do that. that you haven't got. So your option is to start making units where people have to buy your box. Then you've got lock-in. And this is the inevitable consequence of allowing anyone to take your ideas and/or code and reproduce them without any of the R&D costs.
Unfortunately, all those who deny the value of software and suggest that nobody should ever charge for it are damaging the whole software business. The logical end to their goal of destroying Microsoft and any other company selling software is a return to the 1970s, when the only people who could afford to make software were those making the hardware and then those hardware people had total control. Who owned that market? IBM. Now who puts most money into Open Source? IBM?
From a software developer point of view, source code is not, and will never be, knowledge (... knowledge is not wisdom). To think that downloading an opensource application give you the 'so called power' of improving it and of having the best application for nothing (because free) is a pure mirage. If someone download your opensource code and clone the commercial plugin you are selling, the final free product has no future, because the knowledge of how the 'core' is working, the ability of debuging/extending/improving/support it is in your hands. The "opensource cloner" will never be able to compete with you, all that he can do is working for free (i.e. loosing money and maybe preventing you to earn the fruit of you work). Opensource applications that can *really* compete with commercial applications are done by companies which code/maintain/understand the complete product. And these companies need to make money to pay their employees. End of the story.
You've never worked in a company... Most company's can run the worst crap ever made and require you to work around all the problems because they don't care and don't want to spend money on things like software, developers etc.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.