Earning money

> There are a number of advantages people have in mind with respect to "Open Source" or "Free Software". One of them is independence of the vendor. If Oracle goes down, or loses interest in OpenSSO, someone can take over. If Sun/Oracle has slightly conflictling business interests with Novell, the latter can maintain its own semi-fork of OpenOffice.org.

That is rather hard to reconcile with producing software when you don't expect to get back your costs by charging for service. If the only way you have of making money from it is by selling licences, then vendor independance is pretty fatal for you (and may not help the user in the long term if no one is paying for maintainance). Something like the Qt promise, like that if you stop maintaining the software then it will all be released as GPL or whatever, might provide a good middle ground though.

Out of interest, do you know of many non-niche companies that are fully FLOSS and make a profit? Or pieces of software for that matter?