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As Apple's Steve Jobs is announcing that they suddenly "want native third-party applications on the iPhone", something its users have been yearning to have ever since they started buying these phones (even if it meant hacking them), Steve justifies their prior resistance to this kind of openness by security threats. As he says, they are "trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once — provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc."

Now it is time consider what does "open" here really means and what exactly are these security threats he talks about stemming from. "Open" here does not mean "Open Source" and certainly not "Free Software". It means simply letting developers other than Apple write software for iPhone, be it proprietary or Freedomware, just the way Microsoft allows others to write third party software for Windows (which ends up boosting its perceived value quite a bit - no good third party applications equals a not very desirable operating system). Of course, just as Apple fears viruses on iPhone, Microsoft has been and continues to be ridden by them on Windows.

The wikipedia quite simply defines what is a conglomerate.

A conglomerate is a large company that consists of divisions of often seemingly unrelated businesses.

While there are often negative connotations being associated with a conglomerate, the new one which we are witnessing today is different in so many ways. This is a conglomerate you, your project or your business can be a part of to the full extent. All you have to do is observe and play by the rules. This is a conglomerate that we today call: The Community. That is its name.

Some people worry that free software/open source movement leads to the developers being a new "workers" class exploited by the free software companies. In the time when big companies such as RedHat, Sun, HP, Novell etc. are proving how economically viable open source business model can be, some people wonder what's up with "poor" free software programmers and developers who happily contribute their work and source codes to the community for the sake of freedom and bettering the whole society without getting anything in return, economically speaking.
My goal with this article is to define the reasons and motivations for which programmers develop free software and determine if the worry of them becoming the new exploited class of the IT age is well founded