Great article on open source, the peculiarities of software economics, etc.

"To put this in retail terms, open source software has all of the properties of a loss-leader -- minus the loss, of course."

"either the demand-side will ultimately force sufficient improvements to the existing open source databases, or the supply-side will force the open sourcing of one of the viable competitors."

One thing he didn't mention is how the Internet has affected the economics of software.

Internet drastically reduces the distribution costs creating close substitutes widely available for free.

This makes the other economics of software kind of irrelevant. Just ask Microsoft.