Don Park says "What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software... I believe OSAF is a richman's Destructive Crusade against Microsoft's monopoly". Maybe so.

Of course I'm totally in favour of selling software (having spent a large part of my working life at companies which primarily sell software rather than services). I think there will always be software worth paying for, on whatever grounds you justify its cost. Also, it'll always be possible to build various network-centered control points - think servers - in any interesting system; those can turn an application into a service line. Subscription games. Hosted facilities.

Open source infrastructure, or commodity tools, are a great thing. Publishing free software creates a commodity category (and often the best, if not the most used, products in that category). Ximian Evolution is quite close to a commodity app; it's roughly feature-parity with the market leader. But I think OSAF will be significantly different: we haven't seen a massively-successful Agenda-style application, ever. This is not (at least initially) a commodity play.