That's not the point of open source. The point is this:

- I'm an entrepreneur, or I'm being paid by an entrepreneur or a massive corporate entity, to create software that makes money.

- It is my duty as a professional to implement the most reliable, beneficial solution I can, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.

- With this goal in mind, I look around the ecosystem for existing tools, frameworks and applications that will help me achieve my goal. I will generally find any number of open-source products as well as some closed-source products.

-I choose the product (or most frequently, combination of products) that will best help me achieve my business goal. I make my choice irrespective of how the products are licensed.

And THAT, my friends, is the value proposition of open source. Day after day, software developers everywhere are awakening to the fact that the most reliable, most efficient, quickest-growing tools in the business are free of cost, community-supported, and ripe for the picking.

A very small fraction (perhaps 1%) of the people who adopt a given free software product will find that it doesn't quite suit their needs. Funded by their employer or themselves, they will tweak the product until it does what they want -- they then contributed their tweaks back to the community so others can benefit.

Can it ever be a disadvantage, being forced to contribute one's valuable IP back to the community? Of course it can! If your tweaking represents a key competitive differentiator, then by all means, buy a closed-source (or a dual-source) solution.

But, speaking as a software developer with more than a decade of experience and three patents pending, VERY FEW of the changes we make to our tools and frameworks are original or valuable in the business sense.

It is in our "business logic" where money is made -- the bits of code that sit on top of the frameworks and implement the user-relevant part of your application. And THOSE bits of the application are very seldom open source, nor should they be.