Alright, you're just displaying your ignorance at this point. There are plenty of closed-source proprietary apps that I use on Linux for my job, and the vendors manage it just fine. These are applications for chip design, and Linux is really the only platform at this point that anybody uses for this kind of work. You might argue that they are server apps, rather than desktop apps, but most of them have very sophisticated GUIs in addition to shell-like interfaces. Many engineering and science disciplines rely on proprietary desktop apps like I am describing. This is the traditional workstation software market, and it is almost entirely Linux on x86 or x86-64 hardware now. Has been for several years. The software developers have sufficient stability because they worked with RedHat to get it. For example, most of the software I currently use supports, meaning "runs without modification", RHEL3.x and RHEL4.x. The latest versions are supporting RHEL5.x and they are dropping RHEL3.x. That's a huge span of time if you look up the RHEL release dates, and RH, the software developers, and the end customers are dealing with this just fine.

That should say C preprocessor, I believe.

Somebody wrote an encoding module to support braces in python code as kind of a joke. It's called pybraces.

The code that implements it is surprisingly short.