Hi.
...seems like whatever happened was more then just about software philosophy.
Even that I think different from other people on the community does not gives me the right to filter commercial news, announcements or to boycott a commercial company.
But I like public discussion of things that "itches" the public (in a good matter), while other prefers to shut up. I remember that on the past someone told me that I should never-ever-never make a negative comment about Mensys, because the community owns them a lot because they were the only ones that still developed on OS/2. I told him that was not what a community was about, but he was also free to create a "sheep" community without freedom of speech.
Commercial developers also have a legit fear of their sales and effort being cannibalized by free open source offerings - hence if the community is moving towards free and open source they might not wan to develop in it any-more at least in the immediate timeframe because future "sales" are threatened.
Commercial developers are not being cannibalized by open source offerings. It depends to much on what you are developing. If you are going to develop and sell a file compression utility (Winzip, WinRar, etc), you have to know that you are not offering a lot of value. If you want to develop software to sell license you need to create a lot of value for it. It is not like the 80's when they used to set a high prize for a tool that took the developer 3 hours to develop and nobody else had the skill to do it. Today the market (not the OS/2 community) have a lot of customers and developers connected on the Internet, a lot of reference and knowledge it is not available only for an small group of individuals that bought the right book. So maybe the right way to say it is that developers are being cannibalized by globalization, like it happened on every industry.
Software market has turn into a service market. Redhat sells licenses, they share all the source code but the trick is to have a support service to have someone that will answer you if bugs shows up. Sometimes people do not buy a software, they want a service support when things goes wrong. Other people organize raise funds to create/port OSS. Developers also access Crowdfunding services to try to create new products . Microsoft on a strange maneuver did not charged their Win7/8 customer to migrate to version 10 (That was something MS never did on the past). The truth is that software market has changed and transformed and it is never coming back. Today if you want to develop software, you have to think it harder, it is not "money for a license to use" anymore, you need to add value.
If we consider the OS/2 platform my main concern is that people does not have "Free Access" (as freedom and as beer) to get, experiment, use and transform OS/2. If we compare the platform with the alternative OS it is expensive. Also there is always the doubt about the future of the platform, since IBM controls the source code and it is not sharing it and IBM is not developing it. On my way of thinking the only thing that reduce the risk of having a single company to define the future of the software is making it or cloning it as open source.
Regards