At the risk of sounding biased, I should point out that consumers benefit from open source too. Even if most consumers have no intention of ever looking at the code, they still benefit from the fact that others have. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Not only do developers help you find and fix bugs, but they offer the potential of contributing new features.

Naturally, there is a cost associated with developing open-source style, namely documenting and answering questions about the code, managing all the incoming contributions, reviewing them and deciding which ones to apply to your baseline, and making regular snapshots available to the community. Maybe this additional work isn't in the best interest of Hugo, et al. at the present time.

As long as I'm making my bias known I might as well say I'm not convinced the empeg's best market advantage will be its closed source software. Sure, anyone could duplicate the hardware (after some significant effort, I'm certain) and produce something to compete, but if that competitor makes the software open source, guess which unit I'm more likely to want to have? I'm not just speaking as a developer, but as someone who understands the real benefits of open source. Now, if the empeg's software were made open source today, it would have an immediate advantage over any future competitor because of the time investment developers will make in it.

That's enough soapbox for today; I'll go back to hacking on my empeg.