Jim, I think it's yourself that is being funny!
I think that you need to pay closer attention to who is posting and who you are addressing. It is I who is taking you to task over FOSS, Jim has simply commented on his current phone state, and it was he who made the assertion that you couldn't run third party apps on it (and I apologise to Jim if I've put words in his mouth by saying that it was the fact that you had to pay for all
licensed apps until recently on the iPhone).
Just consider for a second what open source software is, why do people develop it??
As you noted below open source software is simply referring to the fact that the license under which it is released means that anyone may request the
source code that accompanies that software. Nothing more, nothing less.
The motivation for doing so is multifaceted. Perhaps some people simply enjoy the challenge of coding, having done that perhaps they enjoy sharing the knowledge that they have with the world, or (and this is where proprietary software could learn
a lot) they acknowledge that they and in turn their code is not perfect, and one way (in my opinion the best way) to find (and indeed often fix) bugs in the code is to
have as many people as possible scrutinised your code which is implicit in using an open source software license. Alternatively, perhaps people feel that they have benefited from the open source community in the past and after having developed and learnt some skills in coding they feel like giving back their time and effort for free to the various communities who helped them for free.
Note that none of these reasons are motivated by financial gain which seems to underpin your motivation.
Following your logic we would have to say that if you want to create open source software then you have to use non commercial products. Which we could follow along to an ultimate end that means OSS could never be produced in the first place!
Indeed, that is the stance that Richard Stallman took when he started the GNU project way back when. He did it in his
own time you don't have to be paid for all the time you spend in front of a computer, many people see it as a hobby, but in this instance Stallman didn't he wanted to make a business out of it, but keep the code open source. How did he do this? Well he had aims for the company (to produce a UNIX like OS under the name of Hird) as well as text editors (viz. Emacs), C/C++/Fortran compilers (GCC suite) and various other things, but he wasn't rigid on what he was going to do. If a company wanted to pay him to develop a feature of the software that wasn't his priority, he then made it his priority until the money stopped coming in (might I suggest reading up on the history and motivation of GNU and other open source software such as BSD, Perl, Python and so forth if you haven't done so already).
Look at other FOSS companies such as Fedora and Ubuntu, how do they turn a profit (and they do)? They do so by selling support rather than restricting access to the source code of their product which ultimately is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If one of their products is found to be lacking the functionality that is required then that dictates the direction in which development will go.
Why are big IT companies such as IBM, Sun, nVidia, HP, Dell and many others actually paying for the development of OSS?
OSS refers to the license that a developer distributes their software under, not the tools that developer uses. For instance I could use commercial software (such as Code Warrior) to create OSS if I wanted. If I choose to give something away under an open source license I do so under the full knowledge that other people can (and likely will) use that to make money. It's like an art collector buying a piece of art and donating it to a museum or gallery to display and profit from.
Well we agree on this point, and its rather fortunate that many people do give their software away for free. Care to guess how many servers run LAMP (Linux Apache (My)SQL and Perl)? Quite a few, such as Amazon and flickr (you can look up the percentage estimate yourself if you fancy). Its a good thing that people are willing to give away their work and knowledge, what would you do if Tim Berners-Lee had kept his hypertext language to himself and his friends?
The art analogy is poor though as it implies that the source code is static which couldn't be further from the truth, the whole point is that users
are supposed to be able to modify them if they are so inclined. I don't think there would be too many art galleries happy if after having been donated a Rembrandt they had to put it on the wall with some paints and brushes next to it and a plaque that read "Improve me if you think you can"!!!
All of which is completely off topic, your original assertion was that there are no 3rd party apps for the iPhone, of which there are in fact hundreds (if not even thousands now!).
As you can see I never said that there
weren't any third party apps, simply that you had to pay for them all by virtue of the API license that developers had to purchase (and again I may have been putting words into Jim's mouth by assuming this is what he meant when he wrote that there were no 3rd Party Apps, as in essence if an application is licensed its not really 3rd Party
per se, at least to my mind).
Good luck with your Ruby development.
