I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").

In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.

I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the "pay for use" binary shareware programs.

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.