You're pushing closed source as the only solution, you insist it's the only thing viable.
Bzzt. No. WRONG. Thanks for playing, please try again.
I have consistantly stated that I like that OSS exists. I have consistantly stated that I have evaluated OSS projects vs closed projects and in the last 5 years I have consistantly chosen closed source. I have given OSS every chance. I used to work for a purely unix-based company, and even there, I led the drive to get Windows servers there, and proved the viability. I have worked for two entirely separate companies that migrated from Lotus Notes to Exchange and from sendmail to Exchange, and had been instrumental in pitching the costs to the "higher ups". TCO to me is critical, yet to you and every other major OSS supporter, it's so off the radar it's like a non issue. So what if sendmail is free. I can pay for Exchange and deliver x,y,z features, offer x^2 level of supportability, offer less servers, cheaper supportability, etc. Who cares if it's free. The costs of NOT choosing closed source shouldn't be ignored either!
But as you say, and I'll try to make this very very clear since you keep missing it: For some people, and some small businesses, free and OSS solutions are viable. Mostly in the personal/home sector, or the mom'n'pop shop that don't have any money to spend at all. Even for the "small" businesses that have 50k to spend on IT, an OSS solution just doesn't deliver the same power that a closed source solution could, in most cases -- at least not without the speed, integration, manageability, interoperability, etc etc [already beaten to death] that you can get...
I have yet to see you even state anything beyond "use what you want" to be fair to either side. I know OSS is viable. Again and again you are being shown how the TCO doesn't work for OSS, it has crappy supportability, it isn't as extensible as closed source, etc. Rather than agree or disprove the argument you always obfuscate it.
Case in point...
It distributes the source code for free.
That is not a feature of the product, Linux. That is a feature of OSS / GPL. Now if you want to say that you have the source code to modify in Linux, where you don't in Windows, ok...
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Initiative/Initiative.mspx
I would recommend you read the "Man in the Middle" section.
Now you could say "but you still can't modify it!". That's not true, that's simply a matter of cost and private licensing. And then, the inevitable question of "but in Linux that's free!"... yadda yadda...
That's why I fundamentally say source code is not a feature of the product. The real issue is customization. Just like the Windows kernel, the Linux kernel is really all about device driver support and file system support. Apache, Bind, Sendmail don't exist, that is not part of Linux, unless you want to consider a package. Hell you can't even say any command line functions are part of Linux. So I could turn this around and say that it wouldn't matter about source code because all the programs aren't even part of Linux, only the kernel.
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