The free software ecosystem has always had a problem with the other software for anyone who isn't a programmer. No one tries to sell programmers software anymore, because we'll do it better for free. It's when we try to make software for people who aren't us that we can't quite manage it. We use OsX at work, because back in 2000 supporting non-technical staff on linux was a pain in the ass and the guys who were around back then don't want to try that again. I loath and despise OsX, but except for the desktop environment I can fix the things that annoy me eventually.That's what keeps me out of Linux: the other software. I mean, OS X is free. The software I run on OS X is, like, nine grand.
I am of the opinion that there is a solid business to be made by closing down the best of the currently available free software and maintaining and continuing to develop a OS/software package under a new commercial brand. There are a lot of people that would make the move to a suite that was well-supported and occupied the middle ground between Windows or Mac, and rolling your own with linux.
I don't think so. On the one hand all the previous releases would still be free, and the project you're shutting down to take commercial would surely get forked, if only out of spite. On the other there used to be many commercial unixes, and they're all dead now. Competing with free and equivalent doesn't work.
Yeah, but Red Hat is selling (support for) free software, not taking it proprietary. They're not competing with free linuxes, they're adding value in the form of support, which is a useful thing if you're in corporate shop and need to cover your ass. "Commercial" was the wrong word, I meant Solaris, Irix and friends.
The intention wouldn't be to release the package as is, but to first overhaul them to take out finicky parts, and to unify them under one design aesthetic. From the initiation of development, the source code would be locked down, and there would exist no free equivalent. Over time, the disparities would grow.