My open source product is due out early next year, after well more than a year in development. Whether it needs to be Open Source or not was a decision I consid

My open source product is due out early next year, after well more than a year in development. Whether it needs to be Open Source or not was a decision I considered very carefully. In the end, I chose Open Source because: a) My product is a application development platform that benefits from people building on it and sharing the code. b) I don't mind making money (at all), but I don't need _a lot_ of money. c) I believe that the way we build companies today will change in future. We might move to a world where something _like_ Wikipedia or Redhat or Mozilla will be considered the benchmark for ultra-successful companies. Creators will provide leadership and benefit from community participation, while the community benefits from shared ownership of knowledge, code, ip etc. Financially, it will be a transition from the high-risk & very-high-reward system we have now, to a lower-risk, lower-reward system.