Not long ago I wrote about how "closed-but-free" software may be a bigger challenge to open source than for-pay proprietary software. Looks like the open source folks at the 451 Group think the same thing: closed-but-free is a challenge to open source, but not an insurmountable one.

Let's make like Jeopardy and phrase this in the form of a question: How can an open source vendor stay ahead of closed-source competition who choose to give away just enough of their product to make most people happy?

The way I see it, you have to do all the things only open source can do. You have to be able and willing to respond to customers in a far shorter time frame; you have to make what you offer into something people are willing to contribute to because it benefits them as much as it does you; and you have to show that being transparent and generous is better than being just generous alone.

This last part is doubly crucial. A lot of the closed-source players are making bigger and bigger gestures toward being transparent or at least that much more reachable -- e.g., Microsoft, everyone's favorite whipping boy in this regard, now is trying to clean up the mess it made of Web standards. That's fine, but it's not a substitute for having transparency from the beginning -- from knowing that you're dealing with people (and projects) who have a legacy of being accountable, and who walk it like they talk it in their code.

I do believe there's room for both closed-but-free and open-and-free players, in the sense that they can both satisfy entirely different sets of needs and not automatically squish each other's toes. Case in point from my own files: I have a personal Web site I built with MySQL and Movable Type, and another project I developed on Windows Server with the free (albeit limited capacity) edition of SQL Server and ASP.NET. Both of them were learning experiences; I wanted to find out what it was like working in each sphere.

The one need that I know closed-but-free can never satisfy completely is the need to to be certain that I'm not shackling myself to something that might not fit the bill. I want my loyalty to be to my work, and not my choice of tools for that work.

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