While I like the ethos of open source, it must not preclude commercial and for-paid software either. Otherwise it becomes a monolitic world and that is not very conducive for a healthy ecosystem to develop around the NIT's. And without a ecosystem of app developers and marketers and 3rd party integrators etc, the market for the NIT's will not increase either. It will remain a niche market again.

And for more people to join the ecosystem, you cannot have a "free and open-source" only condition attached to it. There should be developes who will want to be in it for the money. I see nothing wrong with that. And for them to sell, there must be more users for the NIT's.
Again for more users to come to the NIT world, there must be more apps.

So its this cyclical system that creates a eco-system around any device.

And to what Karel.Johnson said about commercial developers not flocking to the NIT - hardly suprising. With no ecosystem where paid software can flourish around the NIT's I don't begrudge them for not making apps for the NIT.

How does that make us be at their mercy ? I think it's the other way around, where they are at our mercy to release only open sourced free apps or else...

As a longtime Zaurus user, I was very enthused to have such great apps as Textmaker, and some TheKompany apps for which I gladly paid money for. At the same time there were free apps also. That's how a ecosystem should be and that's how choice should be.