Personally, I think it’s better to
some proprietary software in order to stay in business
than it is to make everything open source and go bankrupt.
Writing great software takes great programmers, programmers
have to get paid, and these days you’ve gotta sell something to
cover your payroll.
Incendentally, the strategy VA Linux is pursuing here is probably
similar to what I’ll be doing in the future: open source things that
solve common problems and that will be useful to others, or that
offer an alternative to existing proprietary software, but when
you’ve got a truly innovative, marketable product, sell it.
(Just don’t patent it: if some 15 year old kid wants to write
a better program that does the same thing in his free time,
he should be able to).