This is a common concern of companies that develop proprietary software for their own use. They, rightly, do not want to give away whatever business advantage their in-house software provides them, and as a result of this misconception, often do not investigate whether or not Linux would be a help to them.
The reality is that the decision whether or not to provide their applications, or the source code to those applications, continues to be theirs to make, even when using Linux. They have nothing to fear in this regard.
The Linux kernel, and many applications that run on it, are licensed under the GNU General Public License. Software that is part of the GNU GPL may be copied and distributed to everyone, but not changed, and any changes to the GNU software must be distributed to the public domain. This is designed to prevent forking � in other words, many incompatible versions of Linux � and keep users from adding to or tweaking the core and selling it as proprietary software.
Bottom line: a company using a Linux OS to develop custom applications does not automatically mean that the same company is developing open source applications.
These are the ramblings of 
No comments yet.