Thanks for the link. It is a pretty sensible opinion, although I do believe there is a place for proprietary software on the Linux platform, too. I think both open source and proprietary software can co-exist there, although right now there is a danger of the "loonies" steering things to one extreme or another.

The issue I have with a lot of open source software is twofold: one, as a business model I'm trying to figure out what is the benefit--I'm not seeing a whole lot of decent, working, business models for small projects and hence, small companies. For huge companies like IBM, they *seem* to use it as a way to acquire free labor for their research department, although that is a broad generalization.

Two, some of the open source software that is out there needs some serious UI work. It's not rocket science to come up with a friendly, easy-to-use UI, but still allow for configuration behind the scenes. I do like the idea of worldwide collaboration, however, and the ability for anybody to potentially contribute to a project.