Also, the "bad will" will not ensure that they have no future. Microsoft continues to do well in their core segments - Windows, Office, MS Exchange, Sharepoint, and SQL Server. Yeah, they've taken their lumps with Xbox, Kin, Windows Mobile, etc...but they are still sitting on a pile of cash and they are still making a profit.
What will eventually kill Microsoft is 1)a better Office Suite (sorry, OpenOffice isn't there yet), 2)Mass Adaption of Linux on the desktop, and 3)Open-Source replacements for Active Directory and Exchange.
If Microsoft were to drop their Home Entertainment, Mobile, and Internet divisions, they'd be cutting out a lot of cruft that is dragging the company down.
First off...I'm not distrusting OSS solutions. As you can see, my scenario was very specific to the products that Oracle sells - high-end databases and Line-of-Business applications. Many times, these will be installed on Linux servers, so they are partially OSS.
That said, many Open Source ERP systems run MySQL as a backend. Would you trust that for a mission-critical 24x7 5 9's availability system that gets hammered throughout the day?
As for Stock Exchanges, which ones run on an entirely open source platform? If you say London, you'd be wrong. The database that runs their new system from MilleniumIT (which has yet to be implemented) is Oracle.
GP is correct. That is just Oracle's business model, and it won't kill them off. It may hurt them in the future, but they can limp along like Microsoft for a long time.
The businesses that can afford, and need, Oracle's products are 1)very large, 2)prefer to pay for support contracts, and 3)will not find an open-source equivalent. How many open-source databases can scale to Oracle database? How many open source ERP and/or HRMS packages can operate on the same scale as JDE and Peoplesoft? Would you trust some open-source ERP package running with MySQL backend to handle a million+ daily DB queries and transactions in a multi-site manufacturing environment?
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."