- Open-sourcing has nothing much to do about being free. Using software is never free in terms of money and time, not even for end-users. However, open source s

- Open-sourcing has nothing much to do about being free. Using software is never free in terms of money and time, not even for end-users. However, open source software commoditises applications and removes an artificial barrier that prevents the program from evolving. It effectively de-values software by removing it from the hands of a single vendor and limited customer base in order to generate a greater value of it, to all people. It is possible to exploit the near-sighted greediness of people in order to sell more closed source programs _now_ rather than work towards a common goal together. I'm afraid this will end in a decade or two, though. - As for support, I've used many open-source solutions with great support, and seen money move around there. Support is generally bad in any software but as long as there's a company willing to give support, this is no problem for businesses. For example, Canonical provides support for thousands of programs available via their Ubuntu distributions. Many of them provide support of their own as well if there's need for a more in-depth support. But it's easier for a company with a marketing budget to advertise the illusion that they actually provide support eventhough it usually turns out to be worth nothing much. - UIs tend to be mostly bad both in commercial and open-source programs. The problem is more in the general acceptance of how important a good user interface is. Both open-source and closer-source makers have an incentive to make good UIs if they choose to see the lack of them as a problem. Besides usability is generally so bad that you don't even need a trip to a damn usability laboratory to make the first leap a huge one. Just someone with interest and insight can do wonders and make the user interface tolerable for most people. Investing in a good is really not a competitive advantage against open source software: it's a cheap but greatly unharnessed competitive advantage against any software, available both to open source and closed source software. - I would say that feature requests are much eagerly fulfilled in the open source world than with commercial closed source software. On the other hand, open source projects will make trivial enhancements and features often _too_ gladly. Closed source companies tend to evaluate the usefulness of a feature against development costs. Not really an advantage for commercial vendors, I would say. - Marketing for most open-source solutions is non-existent. This is they key reason for open-source being a minor player. Marketing can make wonders in smoothing out all the issues you pointed out; the quality of the actual product then becomes tangential. - You have absolutely no guarantee that a commercial company won't turn red in the near future. They usually take their software down with them and I've seen this happen so many times that this is actually one of the key reasons why many companies would turn into open source. Not really an advantage for closed source software, rather quite the opposite! In summary, there's a huge market for companies that sell the missing pieces of open source software, channelling all support and commercial whatnot through a single desk and market it as such. The business-types really don't care what's running on their computers but they care about money. An open source codebase can afford these middlemen to sell the software cheaper and make a profit from it. Just let the companies battle in the realm of marketing and conveniently have them grow existing open source software better as a side-product. Everyone benefits from that.