Please explain to me how it's more difficult for an open source project to provide patches and updates than a closed source one. Linux, for example, is much more frequently updated than Mac OS X or Windows, yet Linux is open source and Mac OS X and Windows are closed source.
If you are running an older version of Linux, it doesn't affect my version.
But with peer to peer software, since all nodes communicate with each other if there's a change in the wire protocol or a change in the behavior of a message, everyone needs to upgrade. In Ripple, people who don't upgrade would have to be manually removed from the trusted nodes list, and their connections dropped. This would disrupt the network overlay and could make it difficult for the web based client to find nodes.
You're right, it's clearly impossible to do. Nobody has ever written an open source p2p protocol that has changed. Or they could just inform people that the network is still in it's infancy and as changes are made nodes that do not upgrade will be dropped. Kind of like the mandatory 0.8.1 bitcoin client upgrade.
There is no real reason to keep it closed source at this point except for worries of forks. Well guess what? FORKS ARE GOOD FOR THE PROTOCOL! They're good for the community, they're good for everyone EXCEPT OpenCoin, Inc. Competition is healthy, and the fact that OpenCoin, Inc wants to hinder it until they're guaranteed to make a ton of money just shows how little they care about the protocol and how much they care about money.
Looking over the wiki (at
https://ripple.com/wiki/Main_Page), you would have a difficult time convincing me that OpenCoin cares little about the protocol. In fact, Ripple is more well documentation has a more well defined specification than Bitcoin! Are you aware that the OpenCoin developers write the specs in the wiki
first before committing to adding the code? Here's an example:
https://ripple.com/wiki/Services_API#Federation_protocolThe fact that they won't let anyone else work on their protocol shows how much they care about it. Do they really think that the combined wisdom of the entire internet can not improve their protocol at all? Do you really think that?