The cases of Gnat and Apache are clear in this respect 17 . And cases like Zope 18 seem to demonstrate that at least some investors have realized that fact. If this opinion is true, open source software models should all become self-sustaining. That is, as time goes by, enough resources should be collected by open source projects to maintain a steady level of development. And resources are not reduced to money, as the Linux case demonstrates.
Important resources are, for instance, developers' time, or beta testers.
However, a company producing a new product should consider going open source if there is already a dominant producer in its niche. If not, probably it won't achieve great results, since competing with the proprietary rules is hard for starters, especially in established markets. But going open source, the whole environment, and the rules, change. And this forces the dominant producer to change its strategy, improving on the quality of the product and service, switching to an open source model or offering any improvement that represents value to the buyer of the software product.