I think we should start analyzing reasons why open sourcing something might be dangerous for a company. If this something is the product of the company that is licensed for money the answer is obvious, but how about the code of a internet service? That code is not licenced to anyone - so there would not be any direct loss for the company if it was open source. But there still might be danger of another company taking that code and creating a competing service - this is a real danger, but for example for Slashdot it did not turn to have any impact. There are many other cases, each with it's own dangers - I think they can be catalogued and we could think up countermeasures for them. Those countermeasures could be in the form of new licences or in the form of developing some culture shared among developers. For example there might be a custom of informing the creators of a software platform when someone want's to use it to compete with them. This could be a part of the FairSoftware initiative. -- ZbigniewLukasiak

One danger of OS is that a patent infringement can be proven (you may not know what kind of small silly obvious things may have granted a patent). EthicalPublicDomain goes the direction of developing a culture of sharing. -- HelmutLeitner