This issue has been bugging me lately, given that I would like to start a product-oriented business, but I'm only one guy, who has to freelance to pay the bills.

The problem, I think, lies in the lack of balance between different types of "users", their ability to absorb risk, and their ability to advertise.

For an individual developer, new product development is a chicken-or-egg issue: you need money to live, but you can't make money off of an infant project. On the other hand, a corporation can siphon funds off of profitable projects into R&D, and the larger the company, the longer they can do it. There is a certain level of financial security that removes emotional burdens that can be real impediments to development progress. There is a singular focus that can be achieved by the developers in such a situation: one 100% focused developer is more than twice as productive as one 50% focused developer, all else being equal.

It's also extremely difficult for an individual developer to get the word out on their project. But if Google even breaths a hint that they are doing something, a subreddit will be made for it overnight and TechCrunch will assign a team of reporters to cover breaking news.

So from the start, the individual is behind the 8-ball in terms of being able to maintain a certain pace of development and gain mindshare for it. If you're entering an existing market, a lot of times the only way to gain traction for your project, to get any attention and get anything out of it, is to have to open source it just to meet other developer's expectations.

But I suspect the vast majority of people who want "open source" really only want it as a security blanket and aren't actually going to look at it. I completely admit that I'm included in that group.

For a corporation, what's the worst that can happen? In other words, who is going to fork their source? Another individual? They won't be able to keep up. Another corporation? They have to compete in both code and marketing, which isn't so attractive. It might be--all things considered--an equivalent effort to just start a competing product. Maybe even a little less effort, because you don't have to dance around collaboration and contribution issues.

But for an individual, it's a significantly higher impact of a problem. If I make a tool, release it open source, and--say--Google decides that it's great and they want to use it, even if I license under the GPLv3, they can very easily strong-arm me out of the driver seat. They could be in complete compliance with the license and contribute all of their changes back, but their marketing machine could easily put themselves at the forefront of developers' minds as the source of that project.

Is "closed now, open later" the solution? I don't know, that's always sounded to me like "closed now, closed later". See Android. What good is Android being open source if, by the time the source for the latest version is released, they've abandoned it for a new version?

Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong, so I know in which direction to take my own business development. But it just seems like there are several types of power, and individual, independent developers have few that large corps do not, whereas large corps have several that indies do not.