Nice pretending to be open source, don't trust them, they are not honest from beginning !!!!
Nobody claims Ripple is open source. They're saying it will be open source
eventually.
Things will roll out in phases. I'm certain there's sound logic behind their plan, and no need to spread fud like this yet.
To be fair, the website claims multiple times that it's open source.
That brings me to the other claim on your website: "free(ish)". As Gateways and the intermediaries will be for-profit entities, I don't see how this will be free(ish) at all, even if the base XRP cost is near-free everybody else will charge money. It will possibly be cheaper than other ways of sending money, but I don't even see how that's guaranteed.
Well, if you exchanging xrp for btc or any other currencies with me, I won't charge any fees. If you are purchasing goods from someone with Ripple, they might not charge fees. If you are making a micro purchase of content from your favorite news site, they won't charge fees.
There are lots of instances where the only fee will be very small amount of xrp. By that reasoning, the claim "free(ish)" is not misleading.
I'm primarily looking at XRP as a facilitator currency at the moment rather than anything else. If the system is successful then XRP will clearly have some value attached to it at a given time, but with so much of it in the hands of a for-profit company it's hard to take it seriously as a currency.
Your examples: can there even be a "fee" on a trade? Your fee would surely be part of the price you're offering. I assume the BTC you're exchanging is issued by some Gateway A rather than yourself. Did Gateway A charge you a fee for this? If not, what have they gained by partaking in any of this at all? I'm assuming they aren't a fractional reserve, although this might not be a good assumption. The same goes for the other examples. The person selling something, for instance, doesn't trust me. So when I send him money it'll have to eventually be converted into an IOU from somebody he does trust. If all these intermediary entities and gateways are businesses, and I think they pretty much have to be, then they'll have to be charging fees for their participation.
Obviously I could be misunderstanding something, but in any case I don't see this as a killer to the concept, only that it wouldn't be free. I do see a lot of value in this as a distributed exchange with fees on a web of gateways for deposit or withdrawal.