Eric S. Raymond, working on his latest book The Art of Unix Programming, wrote:
Open source turns software into a service industry. Service-provider firms (think of medical and legal practices) can’t be scaled up by injecting more capital into them; those that try only scale up their fixed costs, overshoot their revenue base, and starve to death. The choices come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to use and modify open-source software for its business purposes).
Incidently, Raymond writes the following in another article:
Open source keeps designers honest. By depriving them of the crutch of obscurity, it forces them towards using methods that are provably secure not only against known attacks but against all possible attacks by an intruder with full knowledge of the system and its source code. This is real security, the kind cryptographers and other professional paranoids respect.
