Your analysis is flawed, it is not the open-ness or closed-ness of software that determines it's market potential, it is the software's marketing department.
Microsoft (whom I'm assuming your referring to as they are almost certainly the most profitable software company to date) has always had a huge problem with piracy. Hiding source code has not helped them keep people from getting a free ride. It has never been a clever way to obscure source code that kept MS afloat, it's the fact that they have a marketing and sales dept. that can out sell any other company hands down.
Hideing source code might make you sleep better at night, but in the end, it will give you little in the way of safety. Google for "any language here" decompiler and your likely to find a few good hits, Java and VB (especially .NET) both have good decompilers out there. C and other machine code compiled languages are a bit trickier, but apparently some one already knows how to do it, the delay is more legal than technical.
I don't really see how you can complain about Perl, executable Perl programs are text files, it's some what hard to assume that a text file will hide your source code. C, VB, and Java all have binary executables, they at least look like they don't send out something that can be translated back to source code.
Short version is, hiding your code is almost worthless in the long run.
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