Flutterby™! :

I hadn't linked to Eric Raymond's new essay, The Magic Cauldron, because I hadn't had a chance to read it. Now I have. I think it's well worth reading if you're managing a product. Unlike Richard Stallman and certain other advocates, Eric makes a reasoned discussion for when it's not economically reasonable to give away code. However, even in the cases where the core technologies need to remain proprietary there's often lots of ancillary code that could be shared and would probably be result in a much improved product if it were.

"There will be circumstances under which the use value of an undisclosed algorithm or technology will be high enough (and the costs associated with unreliability will be low enough, and the risks associated with a supplier monopoly sufficiently tolerable) that consumers will continue to pay for closed software. This is likeliest to remain true in standalone vertical-market applications where network effects are weak. Our lumber-mill example earlier is one such; biometric identification software seems likeliest, of 1999's hot prospects, to be another."