It's not so much an Open Source browser that we need, but rather a port of Internet Explorer 6 to Linux / Unix.

Something worse than Visual Basic? I can't think of any.
SNOBOL? MUMPS? PL/1? Ada? Intercal? APL? Progress 4GL? PHP?

GWBasic 1.0? I dig the notion of BASIC being a gateway drug.

There was a time when Apple built better quality boxes than the every Windows PC.... before the fruity company switched to RISC processors and begged Jobs to come back. Today they build pretty, but flimsy PCs without Windows preinstalled.

The point of having an Open Source publication would be that anybody will be allowed to change any article. We already have that, and it's called Wikipedia.

Who cares about the Operating System, as long as it's cheap, reliable, and trivial for the consumer. It's more about the network and the high-level protocols that will define how devices cooperate or if we have to wait for a vendor to monopolise the market.

Apple's kit may look pretty and cost a pretty penny, but their quality is lacking and lagging. As to software: AFAIK they once had a daughter company called Claris that made some software. Now they just distribute a variant of BSD Unix.

The German state of Bavaria has claimed the copyright over Adolf Hitler's book 'mein Kampf' and used it to prevent it from being printed. This copyright has expired now so the book becomes free.

Frankly, I hardly know who Knuth, Lamport, Liskov, Hoare, Tarjan, Dijkstra or Maxwell are or were. CS grads should know their theories. Donald Knuth belongs to a small club who study the lives of the inventors along with their inventions.

Steve Reich invented minimal music. Steve Jobs just invented the second record company called Apple (the first one being invented by The Beatles - not anywhere as historical as Sun records). Alan Turing invented the Turing Machine - after Conrad Zuse had built a working computer. Al Bell is credited with the telephone. Innovation was patented by the biblical author of Ecclesiastes.

It follows that Open Source software does not and cannot exist, except as an innocent hobby, or else the theories of economics are erring.

The Object-Oriented Paradigm is not that hard, but C++ is very complex and C contains just the functionality you need.

Unix was proclaimed dead in 1990 by Byte Magazine. Windows is broken, Apple is rotten, Solaris has set, IBM AIX with age, HP-UX was fed to ducks, Excel has left Word that it is out of the Office, the Oracle is learning Delphi, but still there's quite a byte of C code running for president every day.

Red Hat gives good support, but it takes time. The optimum answer is to have your own support staff and to be able to escalate serious problems to your vendor, but that's not cheap.