I'm not sure I agree that OSS represents a significant danger to the industry as a whole, though I'm sure the neo-Hippie crowd who back Open Source software would love us all to be living in communes, paying for nothing and sharing everything. Luckily for us, this is a model that doesn't work and will never be the status quo.

MY complaint with OSS is that the only real business model is to require payment for supporting that software. But there's a major flaw with this approach; namely, that better software begets fewer support calls. Every support call SHOULD be seen as a failure of design and/or implementation - the software has bugs or usability has been compromised. If your revenue stream depends on such calls, there's absolutely no incentive to make better software as the act of so doing threatens the business model itself.

Basically, you've got a negative reinforcement model where it PAYS to make the software buggy, less reliable and harder to use! Do your job properly and produce clean, easy to use, fully functional, "bug-free" (anyone who has actually written software will draw great amusement from that phrase, I'm sure) software and your revenue stream dries up. Fix a bug and you'll never make money from that bug again! The real danger stems from the fact that you're forced into a state of regularly releasing essentially unfinished software simply to avoid this situation... completely counter to everything traditional business models have learned over the last few centuries.

Now factor in that, historically, there are few (if any) repurcussions for companies releasing buggy software - do I want software running systems in my car, plane, house, medical equipment, critical business operations, etc. where the vendor is RELYING on me finding flaws with the product while they are held largely unaccountable? I think not.