Seems to me that F/OSS is a evolution of the concept. The fundamental difference being that Shareware/Trialware projects never set out to attract developer communities. For that reason they remained programs that were of the size capable of being developed and maintained by an individual or small group. The utility of these products was therefore much smaller on an individual basis and this limited the possible revenue able to be derived from a single customer.

What they share in common is the inability to monetize a higher volume market. For Shareware/Trialware this was the only market they addressed or could hope to monetize (small dollars large volume), for F/OSS there seems to be an option (the only one most are taking) to try and penetrate the Fortune 500 and forget about the smaller enterprises.

The future of F/OSS is an interesting one. The majority of projects fit the market of infrastructure products and not COTS style applications (ie. those that support business process). Is the future of F/OSS as OEM/ISV bundled technologies that supply industry focussed solutions that support specific business process, or will be stay as the technology of Web 2.0/Startups building the next generation of applications. Maybe it will support the enterprise innovation which cannot be supported by anything other than custom code development. Probably all of the above.

I doubt it is in the traditional software markets, as I think legacy will or should make the leap from closed source model to SaaS or some form of hosted solution. Seems little or no utility in managing software that supported well known and undifferentiated business process (eg. printing cheques, managing employee benefits).

One thing is for sure. Best to be in a small install base market growing at faster than most of the competitors where the biggest challenge is how to convert users into customers. Who would want to be trying to solve the problem of manufacturing "lock-in" to preserve profits, while trying to hack out costs.

I still think you’re missing the point, Savio. Trialware and shareware can’t be taken into production; there comes a point where a procurement decision has to be taken and acts as a gate. Only Free software, not “free” software, is capable of being taken all the way to production. The choice in an adoption-led market is a genuine choice at deployment time of whether to buy the subscription, hire the experts in-house or punt and take the risk.

This, by the way, will eventually force change for open source companies who differentiate between the “community” version and the “enterprise” version and force a procurement decision before deployment.