> "So my concern... is about losing open source as we know it today."
Open source was born out of a closed source world. It couldn't possibly have been a "gift culture" at that time, and yet it birthed and blossomed and amazingly so. To seriously believe open source would go away requires a belief that the forces that birthed it in the first place no longer exist or have significantly diminished. I'd be interesed to hear you expound on that.
That's a rather ahistoric view. Software was initially very much a gift culture in the mainframe, mini-, and micro-computer eras. Even proprietary software licences were often thrown in gratis by vendors trying to sell high-margin proprietary hardware. Proprietary software was largely developed in-house for a company's own use, and regarded as a trade secret, not published as object code and licensed to others.
This state of affairs continued through the initial phases of the workstation/PC era. It was when IBM PC clone hardware (with their narrower profit margins) started to dominate that proprietary software gained more attractive margins, and the ISV era really took off.
It was this growth of proprietary software cutting into and threatening the existing gift-culture during the 80s that prompted the formation of Free Software and Open Source philosophies (the latter named in the 90s but existing all along).
Open source was born out of a closed source world. It couldn't possibly have been a "gift culture" at that time, and yet it birthed and blossomed and amazingly so. To seriously believe open source would go away requires a belief that the forces that birthed it in the first place no longer exist or have significantly diminished. I'd be interesed to hear you expound on that.