I have two good friends who are retired school psychologists from New York ad everytme I read about New York's financial problems, I think of them.

Same thing in California: two relatives are teachers, and one is just about to retire on a teachers pension. I think that California is very close to bankruptcy.

Pensions may sound good, but it may be that only federal government pensions may pay out because the federal government can print money ad pay out in highly devalued dollars).

I view open source software as something that is produced for practical motivations:

1. drive the cost of basic infrastructure towards zero so more money is available for a business's specific problems and applications. I am an independent consultant and from my point of view when the costs of projects are reduced, then there can be more projects. Also, projects are judged based on cost vs. benefit, so more projects can be successful.

2. large companies like IBM make money off of services - open source increases their profits more than the money the contribute to open source projects

I suspect that very long term open source will be even more widely deployed.

That said, I also believe in a healthy commercial software ecosystem. For example, I sometimes use very expensive commercial Common Lisp tools even though the open source tools are also very good. Computer games are probably another area where commercial products will be used more than open source because game development is high cost and high risk.