Its up to the programmer on how they want to distribute their program, but on the open v close preference, I'd have to say Open over Close for the reason that you can tinker around and mess around with it, while if you think it may be groundbreaking in a way, it gives you clearance to demonstrate that to potential clients and the like.

But yes, close source seems to be a fix and fix untill you get it right and thats it, open source is a program that is released (with some bugs), but leaves things open for improvements, and any useful additions that can be coded into the program.

Oooohh! It's getting hot everyday

I would say that in a general scenario (that I see from my peosonal point of view) a programmer would release a software as a open source if

*) He has a great Idea
*) He is not bale to handle the program development all alone may be due to it's complexity!
*) He is a rookie and don't create much useful programmes but want others to review them for him..

Using Linux a lot, I am obviously a big fan of the open source philosophy. In many areas, open source directly competes with closed source software, and is often just as good, if not better. For example, commercial office suites and OpenOffice, commercial recording applications and Audacity. There are, however, a few areas where open source falls dramatically short: Adobe's Photoshop is streets ahead of The GIMP, and the only useful alternative to Adobe Flash I have found, OpenLaszlo, does not have as many features and is quite tricky to use.


Many open source programmers are very experienced, and have often previously worked on commercial projects. The programs may often be small applications, but they are all created for a purpose, and are all useful. Plus, as many cost nothing, you lose nothing if you find it doesn't do what you want it to.

One major downside I have seen in large open source projects (such as KDE) is that they tend to get too tied up in democracy and making sure everyone is happy. Often releases stay in beta longer than Google's projects, but they are still useable and infrequently unstable.