What a tub of lard. Not when 3 (~33%) of the 10 wealthiest Americans made their fortunes on software. Free software is dangerous to the U.S. economy AND security. How could it not be, since it perfectly represents a U.N. viewpoint on the future of the world, so much so they have created entire new divisions of the U.N. to promote open source software around the world.
Unfortunately, however ironic it may be, is how open source has damaged IBM, SCO, SGI, Sun, any U.S. company who has attempted to embrace it. We've instead seen the emergence of Debian, Mandriva, Red Flag, Asianux, a trend that is likely to continue, costing the U.S. billions.
And the others made their money with something else. I wonder how much richer they'd be if they hadn't been shipping millions of dollars to software companies.
open source has damaged IBM, SCO, SGI, Sun
If you compare, IBM isn't doing much worse than Microsoft.
SCO was a poorly managed company from its Caldera beginning, performing worse than other Linux companies. Their UNIX business purchase was an effort to get distribution channels for Linux. Their real downfall was becoming a lawsuit mill instead of concentrating on producing goods and services.
Sun wasn't killed by Linux. It was killed because it was mostly supported by the dotcom bubble (and crashed with it) and cheap x86 hardware was surpassing SPARC in performance giving people no reason to blow five figures on their hardware anymore.
Three of ten is exactly 30%, not ~33%.