Servers are not the strong example you suggest, things are a bit more complicated. Linux largely replaced commercial unix and prevented Microsoft from moving from SOHO to traditional unix environments. Similar story for embedded. In short, you can argue Linux prevented Microsoft's expansion into some new markets but you can't really argue Linux displaced Microsoft to a large degree. In the web server segment Apache was more a story of picking up more newcomers to what had been a tradition unix solution than conversion of existing IIS customers. In any case this is a tangent and back to the real point ...

In reality what an OSS using company could face if its customers are largely technically unsophisticated would not be the crude MS FUD you refer to. It would probably be something close to a competitor's salesperson telling a potential client that the OSS using company has an infrastructure based on software written in part by hobbyists and other volunteers with no accountability, while the competitors solution is based upon the industry leader Oracle. Is that a fair characterization? No. But it is the sort of card that is successfully played every day. As you have admitted, the average customer probably has no idea what free software is. A competitor's sales person can turn that into a liability. At best you are placed on the defensive and have to rebut their characterization, spending time justifying OSS rather than selling your products/services. Worse the potential customer probably realizes that his/her boss knows even less about OSS than they do and fears having to defend their decision when the inevitable technical problem occurs. If we're talking IIS vs Apache then there is enough of a security and reliability difference that nearly anyone can defend the selection of OSS. When we get to something like MySQL vs Oracle the differences are not so great, and many will just go with Oracle knowing that choice offers little room for second guessing and/or gamesmanship.

Again, if your customers are technically unsophisticated then the perception of security/stability offered by a brand name industry leader can legitimately outweigh technical advantages of OSS. Sad but true.

That's not true. If a company service fails its clients due to a database problem, and it becomes public knowledge that the database was OSS, there could be a downside for going OSS over Oracle. Fair or not, accurate or not, well informed or not ... the public at large trusts large commercial outfits like Oracle and are largely ignorant of OSS. Hostile lawyers or competitors could claim the company used "inferior" tech in their infrastructure, it could negatively impact sales. In the 60's and 70's there were various mainframe and minicomputer vendors, what was the popular saying: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Its the same CYA behavior and it is not necessarily delusional.

Look at it another way, don't some vendor receive good karma when they tell a technically savvy audience they are using high reliability low cost OSS? The dark flip side is that some vendors receive good karma when they tell a technically unsophisticated audience that they are using the "brand name" high cost solution. So whether your company is being silly or not depends on the nature of its customers, the technical merits of OSS vs Oracle may not be a relevant factor. If customers are willing to pay for brand name warn fuzzy felling the company is probably doing the right thing.

A business relationship does not require money to change hands. I suspect that like contracts all that is required is that both parties receive some sort of "consideration", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration. Consideration is obvious for the user(s), they get the software, but consideration for the author(s) could be quite varied. Passing along the author's work (as the GPL requires), reporting bugs back to the author, mere use of the software enhancing the author's standing in a community (or maybe just stroking the ego), ... I'm sure a real lawyer could get quite creative, as they have successfully done with consideration under contract law. Unless of course the legislation gives OSS authors a special status which they currently do not have.

A while ago in college I came across some research on what is legally the militia. US Federal Law defined the militia as all able bodied male citizens ages 18 to 45 for those who had *never* served in the regular military, 18 to 55 for those who had served. This constitutes the inactive "unorganized militia". The "organized militia" were those who had officially signed up with their states and periodically underwent training. These organized state militias were federalized into the National Guard prior to World War 1 and were required to equip and train like the regular Army. Federal Law went on to say that the inactive unorganized militia could be called up to serve in the National Guard in time of national emergency. In short this is the legal basis for drafting a civilian into the military. So many of us civilians in the US are in the unorganized militia.

It is also true that some countries have fully automatic weapons in most citizen's homes and they don't have internal violence issues. My only point is that it is naive to blame guns themselves. The argument you present is really claiming that some people, Americans in particular, can not be trusted to behave themselves. I don't agree but it is a valid point to discuss, I only disagree with the "guns are to blame" camouflage.

IMHO, as long as devices don't "phone home" and the data is kept in the device until the *owner* submits it for warranty repairs there is no foul. If we get lower prices (or a delay in a price increases) and/or longer warranties then the tradeoff seems reasonable. Of course I'm biased, I worked in tech support long ago and I am a bit familiar with the -- hmm how shall I put this -- the "opportunistic" nature of a non-trivial number of consumers. :-) To be fair I think that owners should be able to see the current sensor logs, Settings | General | About on an iPhone for example, if for no other reason than to verify the devices state at the time of purchase. While in a manufacturing facility I've seen s person spill a box of hard drives onto the floor and perform a couple of did-anyone-see-that head swivels as they picked up the drives.

One of the big factors that makes Boot Camp such a successful Windows on a Mac story is that *Apple* provides various Windows drivers for XP and Vista. So you are a little premature to claim that Apple can not be at fault. Apple drivers *may* be failing to put the CPU into battery life mode when on a battery, fail to dim the screen backlighting, fail to turn off keyboard lighting, etc.

I am also suspicious about Apple supplied drivers degrading battery life, bugs seem too obvious and fortuitous for Apple to pass them off as chance. I've noticed that when my MacBook is on battery Vista is in performance mode by default rather than battery life mode. Updating the configuration for a should-have-been-the-default setting of performance on AC and battery life on battery greatly improved the battery. Remembering to adjust the screen backlighting also makes a dramatic improve, both under Vista and Mac OS X.