A few years ago, I bought the DVD for "Rocky and Bullwinkle - Fractured Fairy Tales". I popped it into my Ubuntu system and immediately began watching "Sleeping Beauty Land" and "Riding Hoods Anonymous". It was awesome!
Until I tried to watch the same DVD on a normal DVD player. It had a 15 minute, unskipable ad for some old crappy rabbit movie. As a result, I never watch movies on a regular DVD player. With Ubuntu, I get to the main menu immediately, regardless of what "unskipable" ads the DVD has. It is worth it for that reason alone.
But there is no hockey, at least not at the NHL level. That should start riots in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto at least, or perhaps staging a coup-de-tat of Gary Bettman. To make it even worse, the Stanley Cup is in possession of the LA Kings which should offend Canadians everywhere.
Oh, wait, Canadians actually have lots of good hockey that isn't NHL. Here in the states, it is either the NHL or the Frozen Four if you are lucky. Oh, well, pitchers and catchers report in February.
That is cool. It is nice that you can configure firewalls to protect against layer 7 attacks. It is a great part of defence in depth. If I set up the firewalls I would do this. Of course I don't, and the bureaucracy makes the Vogons look nimble. They would feed their own grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblater Beast of Traal rather than change the rules. And of course, some other "developer" with some clout would get an exception so his craptastic application still works.
I love the idea of a Firewall protecting my app, but would rather write the 2 lines of code to ensure my app doesn't get pwned if it doesn't for whatever reason.
License cost is not just important for someone messing around at home. It can have a profound impact on large corporations too. There it is not so much the cost of the license itself, but the cost of procuring and managing them. With Server 2008, you have to have install and configure "activation servers". WTF? The amount of time spent managing license keys, activation servers, and other bullshit is time you are not working on something productive. Say what you want about Oracle, one thing the get right is they don't have any activation codes or similar crap, yet the last time I checked they still make boatloads of money.
Should you happen to find a new commercial program you need, expect to wait 6 months for the trolls at procurment to either reject it or simply ignore it. On the other hand, with open source, just download and compile. It also a lot easier to get something new through security, as you can say: "I compiled this from source. I have a few minor custom settings, and all of these, along with the compile scripts are in CM. Much easier (and safer) than trusting a random binary BLOB
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.