Point well taken. But how about (and I have absolutely no idea if these companies you mentioned tried anything liked thir or not), releasing "version lines", so you actively maintain and fix bugs for v1 line, and sell v2. Or maybe as another poster said, which I know would amount to crippleware to some extent, but that's another discussion, have some "freemium" approach in that v1 is the same as v2 bugs-wise, but not feature-wise. So you backport to v1 all the bug fixes you...uhmm..fix.. in v2, except of course those which have something to do with an unsupported feature.

Of course this means solving a host of other problems, considering you have to keep two similar-yet-different codebases, still, I'm interested in what you think of this. Maybe as you say, him alone could not handle it, but may be a small team could?

I mean, there *must* be some way of satisfying both needs of what I would say is a big group of developers, wanting to contribute their grain of salt but not completely ready to embrace full-blown oper-source models. Or are we coming to a point where you basically have no real choice (regarding successful penetration in the market) between going RH style open source or traditional closed source? is there really no other viable way of doing this? (and I ask sincerely, no sacarsm intended)

I believe parent has nailed it.

Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)

So I propose this. How about you release version 1.0 and 1.5 for example (or 1.0 and 2.0 or something) as regular closed-source software, and then when the next version comes out, you release the previous one as open source (e.g. release 1.0 and 2.0 for pay, when you release 3.0 for licensing you release at the same time v1.0 as open source)

Of course this would mean that you would have to have a road map for what you plan to introduce to your software along the years, so its easier to establish which version is to be safely released as open source without it hurting your paying customers. So, I think you would have to make significant changes and upgrades along the life of your software so it stays competitive and entices costumers to keep upgrading instead of waiting for the open source version, or in the case where the user doesn't really need the "greatest and latest" he could fallback to v1.0.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually put to work something like this, and actually this is an idea I believe I read here on Slashdot as it is, but I think, if not directly useful to you, could give you an idea of a "hybrid" approach, where certain functionality is still closed source as it requires the most of your time (so it costs more) but you still have the open version to maybe encourage some devs to take interest in this framework, or at least show your clientele that you really care about open source however economically infeasible it is for you.

I would say its on the same line of thought as "pay-what-you-think-its-worth" for games like World of Goo and such. You could effectively buy it for 1 dollar, but like me, a lot of people thought it was really nice of them to do this and since I actually enjoyed the game a lot, I payed like 15 or 20 USD (the original price). And even use that as a marketing tool.

Just my 2 bytes...I mean cents.

Is it just me or does anyone else think congress people spend way too much tax-payers money coming up with these bill names.

I mean, come on: PROTECT IP, PRECISE, etc etc. It almost seems as if they would get together to discuss the naming instead of the actual bill content.

No?

Beyond the obvious fact that we will never know for sure who actually created it, it seems pretty naive to think a US 'cyber analyst' would say or even think anything different. After all Israel is a close US ally so it isn't like they would be interested in "telling the truth". It's like the boy who punches the other boy behind the teacher's back, of course he is not going to rat itself.

So how is this a credible source? Maybe if it came from a team of international security researchers with evidence or something I would deem it a valuable piece of analysis.

I kinda see this "research" as the ones conducted by Microsoft to evaluate IE, or Google to do so with Chrome and, oh surprise, they always come ahead. More like a political thing to say than any actual useful information or analysis being brought to light.