Neither can iTunes.

I dont think you've had much experience in the enterprise world. Ive only used toy SAP systems to test some interfacing but typical implementations are gignormous this is the kind of stuff that replaces departments of hundreds of people.

I thought you had to write robots.txt on your roof in foot high letters.

Right now, I can install Linux on any number of systems I have as well as systems at work, including all sorts of software, without any legal worries about licensing

Except that what alot of people are now realising is that you cant because it impairs your ability to write your own non-GPL'ed code.

Im unconvinced your any less locked in to be honest. Any non-trivial product in the OSS world is maintained by a specific team of people, usually funded by a corporate sponser. Realistically the time it takes to build the skills required to provide support makes it cost prohibitive for anyone but core developers to maintain most software. So if the core developers quite, like say because their corporate sponser quits footing the bills then your in almost exactly the same situation as with proprietary software. Possibly worse since most will be under no obligation to provide migrations paths.

Oh yes the linker elves.

What the hell do you do with yours? I have a 2yo work laptop that gets taken home every night and is absolutely fine and a 5 year old personal laptop that also gets lugged to band practice once a week (and associated exposure to beer, sweat, dropping, and risk of crushing by 4x12) and it doesnt show any signs of failure either.

I think you might be doing something wrong if you only a get a year out of yours.

Actually java datatypes are machine independant so they can be serialised and unserialised across architectures. Altering the size of the primitive types simply because your happening to be running on a different wordwidth cpu is a bad idea for portability.