I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is that it'

I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is that it's always designed by committee. In most cases, this produces cleaner, faster, more robust code, but it's not true in every case. Open-source code has this tendency to get the basics right before improving the user experience, but if the standards and basics are fuzzy, the product never gets polished. Take OpenOffice - by trying to both copy MS and improve MS, it's no wonder the entire thing is a big bloated mess. Some others have mentioned Apple as a counter-example, and I think they're dead on. By allowing BSD to be close-source forked, the market provided the economic incentive to allow Apple to run with it. They could then close a lot of the difficulties in an OS (arbitrary hardware setups, unwillingness to couple strongly to applications, etc.), and they've made an incredible product out of it. Philosophically, open-source would never make anything like OS X, because of the amount of vertical integration. There isn't always incentive to move a project back to closed-source, and it's hard to argue that it's a long term strategy, but you can't say that the market universally crushes projects that aren't open-source.