Sorry, if you want to be picky about it then I would say the internet was built on a combination of the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses. The GPL is just the cream that floats to the top.

You only have commercial backing if the OS you're running it on starts with Windows and doesn't include Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, Haiku, Amiga OS, etc... in the name.

Any of the open source file systems are "universal". The problem is adoption and the MS marketing machine would hang them out to dry. Personally, ext2 works fine for the most part. However, I had issues getting Windows to work with it. FreeBSD can read from it, but write can be problematic. The "best" is FAT32, but this has issues with larger disks. NTFS is probably 2nd "best", but it's overly complicated to implement for just some external storage. By implementation I mean the actual writing of the fs driver, not the use of NTFS-3g or whatever. NTFS is a complicated file system with a lot of layers for security, etc... which are superfluous for a basic USB disc.

Personally, ext2 or UFS would be my choice. USB external storage doesn't require performance. If performance is required you're running SATA or eSATA and shared via NFS, SMB, WebDAV or FTP and the filesystem doesn't really matter as it's permanently connected to an OS.

For me, VirtualBox wins purely out of the fact that it's mostly open source and supports the largest amount of host OSs and runs on a few more that aren't "supported" officially. Finally, a virtual machine that works with FreeBSD as a host.

However, from a performance standpoint I can't tell the difference between VMware and VirtualBox, except perhaps that VirtualBox doesn't seem to hammer the host OS quite as hard.

So, currently there is an issue with xorg 7.5 being imported into FreeBSD due very Linux specific driver "hacks", specifically in the latest Intel drivers and the ATI radeon drivers. Is this the same issue? Will this Nouveau driver work on anything else or is "open source" becoming synonymous with "if it runs on Linux, that's good enough". Linux has achieved great strides, but far too many "open source" developers target Linux only and have blinders on to any other open source OS or UNIX'esque OS where this stuff should really be able to run.

Yes, but I've never seen a sugar beet mate with a frog before, for example. Some of these genetic modifications are not just crossing species or even phyla boundaries, but whole kingdom's of animal / plant classification.

Egh, Active Directory is just LDAP with Kerberos and some proprietary crap thrown on top to make in hard to interoperate with other OS's. The group policy tree is just a centralized registry management system. So, no you're wrong. It isn't as plug and play, but a LDAP setup with single sign on via kerberos and a puppet system to manage the config files (Linux does not use a registry) thrown together with a custom package repository (the SUS equivalent) and you're good to go.

However, where Microsoft wins out is that that isn't easy to roll out. MS has the marketing and the 5 clicks that lets a "manager / phb" install MS server and call themselves admins. The bottom 2/3rds of the Microsoft install base, at the server level, mostly don't know what they're doing and really don't understand the underlying tech of what AD is. Once you start rolling out large Fortune 500 style install bases you really do need to know your stuff and most admins at this level probably could do a Linux / UNIX / OS X setup of the same scale with a little work and reading. However, the end users / managers don't want this since they've been rather well indoctrinated by the MS marketing team.

Personally, I like to sum this up by stating that with MS it's very easy to turn the key and go from 0-40MPH, but to make it all the way to 60MPH it gets difficult and the hood of your car is welded shut. The Linux's and BSD's of the world make you learn how the engine works first, but once you've got it figured out you still make it to 60MPH before MS does.