Re:Wrong emphasis (Score 1)

Even if MS could keep itself profitable in the OSS world (which is still a big question) There is no way you can service OS effectively in this manner. Make it so that if I find a bug, all I have to do is fix it and submit a patch. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. So you submit a patch... But before you've submitted it did you spend a couple of weeks testing it to make sure that it fixes all the variations of a problem? Or that it doesn't break something else? Or something else in the component that relies on the one that you've just fixed? Maybe you could post your concerns to the furum related to this component but the one guy who really understands it is between jobs or has his university finals and just doesn't have the resources at the moment... Now suppose you even took care of all mentioned above and eventually the source file accumulated 10 patches from 10 different people. Would they all have same coding standards? Would they all be available some time later is a question arose about something they wrote? Servicing is a tough and neccesery process. No corporation in it's right mind would use a software without some kind of servicing. Even in the cases of OSS they rely on someone like RedHat to do it. And look at the bug turnaround times: they are 3-4 times longer for RedHat than for Microsoft... You can open-source development but I'm yet to see open-source software servicing... Don't get me wrong - I like OSS and use it myself a lot but while it's ok to use it for my personal tasks on my home PC I doubt that I'll board and airplane with OSS firmware... :)