She didn't get in trouble for saying it; she got in trouble because the media found out she said it.

You also started out with only three million citizens. Now you have a hundred times that. The world changes. Deal with it.

I'd guess he's saying that eBay don't encrypt passwords so that they can identify people who have the same passwords, because those people are probably actually the same person. Of course, that's complete nonsense, so maybe that's not what he means.

Yes.

Are we? Consumers have no incentive to favour bad software over good software. Why would you buy a support contract for inferior software? You know it will ultimately cost you more. Vendor lock-in is probably no justification: if the all options are FOSS, the features you need from a particular piece of badly-written software can be cleaned up and transplanted into a good piece of software. For software you intend to use for a long time, this will probably work out cheaper than using the bad software as-is. And bear in mind you don't have to foot the bill alone. A simple solution to the "nobody wants to pay to develop software other people will use for free" stalemate is for interested companies to form a consortium to share the costs of development. The only good reason you have for buying a support contract for crap software is if all the developers working in that field collaborated to ensure their software sucked.

These two options are not mutually exclusive. In my experience, proprietary software is more usually "intentionally unintelligible": if a program is brittle and hard to predict, it is hard to make a compatible alternative.