Android takes the title of open for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's open source (not the crap manufacturers put on top, but Google's Android,) the market is more open, and the market isn't the only show in town. If Jobs wants to attack specific bad implementations that layer closed crap on top, I'll applaud him -- but you can't generalize that to every phone.

By your 1% definition, even gNewSense wouldn't be open if you put it in front of my grandmother.

Quite. But Google won't let Firefox simply beat them; they'll continue to make Chrome faster in an effort to drive performance with competition.

That's why we're paid. QAs: Doing the suck for you.

35% * 35% ~ 12%. And that ignores that one word is a known control, while the other is a word they're trying to OCR.

What exactly are they dreaming about? I've only dealt with a few, but the open-source hardware companies I've purchased from are catering to individuals who don't need a PC motherboard or a 3GHz processor for their project. Think Arduino or GPS breakout board. In reality, cost barriers to open source hardware are progressing quite nicely. Access to fab resources in China and pick and place machines are dropping in price; doing it on your own is much more accessible. For examples, check out the aforementioned Arduino or the stuff Makerbot creates. 3d printers at a price-point of $1,000 were a pie in the sky dream 10 years ago. And lastly, open source isn't always about free as in bear. People still pay for Linux. I still pay for open source hobbyist hardware. I purchase it instead of other roughly equivalent devices because it's more easily modifiable, is easily hacked upon, is often quite well documented, and it's easy to find support. Adafruit has recently mentioned that "[t]here are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies". It seems to be working for some of us.

I notice that most of Slashdot appears to be anti-McMillan, and not anti-Amazon (surprise). For a different perspective on the issue, everyone should read the post by Tobias Buckell on the matter. In short, he is a midlist author, and he talks about his experience with the eBook market. He has seen negligible differences when his books are given away from free versus when they are charged for, and the lower price points are not enough to cover the costs (which he outlines) to go to market.

Agree, disagree, it is helpful to read a perspective from the other side.

The economics blogs have been talking about this issue for a while. All of the blogs that saw this coming for years (like CalculatedRisk) are very anti-quant.

What we are seeing is a push for the study of behavioral economics, as seen in the popular new book Animal Spirits. This book is being heavily quoted by Obama's Budget Director Peter Orszag.