Comment by bob1029

My current position is a source available license for any product I am working on solo. You can definitely get at the source code, but I'm gonna make you pay me money first and sign an NDA.

I strongly believe in the principles of OSS for things like frameworks and tools that everyone in the community can benefit from. But, when it comes to extremely complex end products like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc., it's a lot harder for me to buy the community-is-better argument. Even in some cases the frameworks & tools being semi-proprietary has major benefits (.NET/Visual Studio dev experience).

There are tradeoffs with everything. The key is focusing on the customer. Who do you want to keep around as your customer? You aren't going to make everyone happy. Someone is always going to be pissed at your particular approach. Might as well take a path that makes you a little bit of money if you can.