1. I don’t think people are paying for an open source tool in this case, since ANGEL has made the source code available for free. If you want to run their modified version of TiddlyWiki without paying them a licensing fee, you can. What customers are paying for is the other 99% of functionality in ANGEL, the integration between ANGEL and TiddlyWiki, and the support.

2. Specifics matter. TiddlyWiki is a particularly small and simple open source project. I can’t imagine that ANGEL is going to need a lot of support from the project developers to keep their own system running. That doesn’t mean there aren’t situations in which this question would yield a different answer. But it’s not always directly related to the size of the OSS project, either. For example, lots of proprietary software systems incorporate Apache projects in them, but because the open source software is mature and has well-defined interfaces, the potential for added complexity for support is often (though not always) a non-issue.

3. Again, TiddlyWiki is tiny and probably doesn’t take up significant developer bandwidth. I suspect one of the points you may be hinting at with this question and the one before it is that universities who adopt open source applications don’t necessarily have to hire developers to maintain them either, as the inaccurate cliche would have it.

4. If you buy my answer to your first question, then licensing fees shouldn’t be affected. A lot depends on your perception regarding what percentage of the value of the proprietary product is actually coming from the underlying open source application. Adding an open source widget to a proprietary application probably has a very different impact on perceived value than adding a proprietary widget to an open source application.

5. I don’t think this particular case speaks one way or the other to the relative speed of open source development. If you want to compare apples to apples, then look at how quickly new features get into comparable systems like Moodle or Sakai (or Dokeos, or LON-CAPA, or whatever). The ANGEL/TiddlyWiki case, IMHO, speaks more directly to the value of modularity that enables the re-use of externally developed components, regardless of the license under which they are available.

1. How do folks feel about paying for an open source tool?
2. Will this provide folks with a sense of security knowing Angel is backing and contributing to a project, or will folks wonder who Angel is going to call at 2:00 a.m. when the wiki goes down?
3. How many developers does Angel need to hire now that they have incorporated an OS tool and thus needs to support it?
4. How then might licensing fees charged to current customers be affected?
5. How might this validate one of the claims of Open Source advocates, that OSS enjoys quicker development?