It's awesome that you use FOSS software at home and save money doing so. Unless you're planning on employing all of your university's students upon graduation you need to consider what they should be familiar with to be competitive in the job market.

By all means provide FOSS alternatives, but keep in mind that you are truly disservicing every single design student that you don't expose to OS X, as well as every business major you don't expose to MS Office, and every comp sci major that isn't exposed to OS X, windows, and Linux.

If your university cares at all about its students it'll be a lot easier to convince them to adopt some FOSS alternatives than it will be to get them to drop their current licensed software. Thus I think the money angle is a bad one.

You're assuming they'll attempt to leave the solar system on the .0001% chance that they'll find another planet suitable for human habitation. It's far more likely they'll attempt to travel back in time to a point when the sun was still operational, in which case they'll either fail and the rollover will make them think it was a success providing them with a few hours of hope before their inevitable demise, or they'll succeed and all of their clocks will be conveniently set to match their new place in time. Cox is aware of all possibilities. He's engineered a spectacular win/win.

To my mind the only market with a significant portion of customers that actually care about the "openness" of open source software is the business market, and even there it is severely limited.

If it's a matter of pricing to be competitive keep in mind that for the average home user Windows already appears to be free. They bought a computer from Dell and Windows was already on it. I imagine most folks aren't going to care enough to calculate how much of the price they paid for their new computer went toward making that happen. To them Windows == Computer.

The deal isn't as good as it sounds. There are so so many ways for the company to compromise the quality of their offer without actually breaking their agreement and exposing themselves to legal risk (diluting the shares, sneaky divestment clauses), whereas your end is so straightforward that you're going to have a hard time breaking it without exposing yourself to substantial legal risk. You could get a lawyer involved but that's more likely to flat out end negotiations than it is to actually mitigate the above mentioned factors.

Let me know when IE stops being a stick in the mud so this will actually matter. No one in their right mind would bring a Firefox only web app to market.