Kenny, I asked "to whom is it a weakness?" and you replied "It’s a weakness in that you can’t gain economic advantage over competitors." So I have to assume that it is a weakness for proprietary software manufacturers.

But Nicholas Gruen was speaking from the consumer side of the equation, not from the angle of the software corporation under threat from a movement that shares its knowledge for everyone's benefit.

"These companies have to turn a profit so R&D needs to be paid for, so far no one has come up with a business model within the Open source community that will allow that with any certainty."

Well actually Kenny, that's the whole point. The reality is that R&D is conducted by the community, so they don't need to build a business model. And an additional reality is that they will continue to improve without the need to address the marketing issues that sit alongside every stage of commercial development.

You are right, it is early days. But it is a powerful concept, and the benefits to the end-user will ultimately dictate who survives and who falls by the wayside.

"I've published more original and important articles but, without big marketing efforts they mostly gather dust in university libraries. Until now. ... Within a week of being posted on the Internet, the article had gone “open-source”, being downloaded thousands of times from the Policy website. It was picked up at osnews.com sparking an online discussion. ... The fortune of my essay extolling the power of open-source was itself illustrating the power of open-source."

Or merely illustrating the power of online publishing. OS does not necessarily have anything to do with it. Arguably you'd have got the same effect by publishing in most online journals - you could have been cited and could have been quoted irrespective of whether yr prose was OS or not

Pericles That is also my point the level of R&D is conducted by the open source community is generally not of a high enough standard for non stop systems. Nor is great deal of time spent making it fool proof so as to be usefull to the wider pc users.