Well, now there is at least one profitable company that came out of all those millions that were poured into Linux-related IPOs during The Great Excitement. This is news, even if Microsoft doesn't like it.
I've always thought that the open source model was a pretty good idea for common infrastructure items like operating systems, web servers, email servers, and even DBMS's. The trouble was that because of the history (Richard Stallman, et. al.) the idea of "open source" got tangled up with the whole "free of charge" business, which really wasn't related and needed badly to be dumped if open source were ever to really take off. It seemed to me that the "free" in "free software" always had more to do with 'freedom' than with 'provided at no charge,' and particularly in a business setting people would be willing to pay money to support development of software they could have the source to and customize. That evolution in thinking has been a long time coming, and part of it had to await the demise of the companies that bought into the more strident hoo-hah from the Free Software Foundation and the like.
That's starting to happen, and the result is a profitable Red Hat, among other things. I think we'll be seeing more of this.
You can not be -- oh, my god -- that is the funniest thing I've ever -- man, you can't have just posted that -- this is too easy -- I now have seen it all -- you post so much MS advertising -- now you say this --
Thank you, thank you for that.
I haven't laughed so hard in a long, long time.