Richard Stallman answered this long ago. In academia, common practice dictates that when a problem is solved, you contribute it to the community in the name of progress. And not only that, your solution may not be the best possible one so you allow others to improve upon it. This is done because the number of problems far outweighs the number of solutions. Time and money can not be wasted on resolving problems that have already been solved.
Unfortunately, commercial software practice is at direct odds with academia. This practice dictates that you must first squeeze every penny out of your solution. Traditionally, this is done by guarding the source code.
Proof: That article was written April of last year and, more proof, all (or most) major Unix vendors have abandoned Motif and made the switch to GNOME.
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I'm sure that is true...for some people. But it simply is not one of the largest reasons.
The reasons why people write open source is still the same as it was when RMS founded the FSF and the GNU project about 20 years ago.
Richard Stallman answered this long ago. In academia, common practice dictates that when a problem is solved, you contribute it to the community in the name of progress. And not only that, your solution may not be the best possible one so you allow others to improve upon it. This is done because the number of problems far outweighs the number of solutions. Time and money can not be wasted on resolving problems that have already been solved.
Unfortunately, commercial software practice is at direct odds with academia. This practice dictates that you must first squeeze every penny out of your solution. Traditionally, this is done by guarding the source code.
Proof: That article was written April of last year and, more proof, all (or most) major Unix vendors have abandoned Motif and made the switch to GNOME.