That is an interesting perspective. I would suggest that what IBM are doing is exactly how the BSD open source license is intended to work. Let the market decide if the additions that have been made to the raw open source code are worth the money being charged. There are several bits of added value in the IBM proposition. Firstly they have added a reasonable amount of back end integration and some nice scripted tools. I know the work involved in producing this kind of thing having worked on similar things - a rough estimate of the development costs for the work I've done would be £30k, and another £20k would be needed to get something approaching a packaged product - that takes a lot of effort. So if I could sell an installation at £50k I'd recoup my costs. But I don't have the IBM brand, so maybe I'd have to sell 5 installations. Just to recoup the dev costs. Then there's ongoing support, patching, new releases, time spent prospecting for new customers. All the stuff it takes to turn a piece of code and an idea into a business. Look at it from another angle - if a enterprise with no relevant skills wants to explore virtual worlds as a route to cutting costs, how much do you think it would cost them to take raw OpenSim out of the box, starting from circle island and build a usable, stable meeting facility integrated with some existing intranet? If it's anywhere close to $50k then they are better off going to IBM. If you could do it for substantially less you should - you'd clean up. In terms of the calibre of people working on this inside IBM I think your characterisation is wrong. There are very talented and committed people working on this stuff, and releasing the results of their efforts back to the open source community (for example - see this recent post regarding Vivox Spatial voice integration in OpenSim, taken directly from the SameTIme 3D work) The bottom line is that if the price is wrong, the product won't sell. And if the price is right and that cheeses people off, then there's nothing stopping them doing the same. That's what we're doing :-)