[happycampers]

I agree with the author, but for different reasons. As a developer, I think open source software is great and I use Linux every day in my job, but as a capitalist I would contend that profit potential drives innovation. I would also contend that having a development effort under one roof, which is rarely the case in the FOSS world, drives development speed, if not necessarily quality.

On the flip side, FOSS is great because it encourages users and developers to contribute to the product out of a sense of community, and I would guess that most contributors regard their favorite OSS project as a labor of love (you know, like something you would gladly do for FREE).

Having said all that, I doubt that FOSS will ever be able to get a product out to market as quickly as a profit-driven organization. At the same time, I believe it would be rare for a commercial enterprise to approach the quality of a mature OSS product (I'm talking projects like apache, the linux kernel, X11, firefox here, not not some single-contributor home-baked utility, many of which are really great and grow into mature efforts themselves, but many of which also remain immature due to lack of resources for testing, etc).

ua549, you seem surprisingly unaware of OSS's position in software security for a forum moderator; open source software is much more secure than commercial equivalents BECAUSE of its open source nature. You can never know for sure what kind of spyware lurks in the depths of a closed-source application, but you can be sure that it would not take long for some FOSS developer to blow the whistle on malicious code in an open source venture. You also appear to be under the impression that just anyone can add code to a source tree without accountability. This is far from the truth; most core FOSS development efforts are tightly controlled with change control procedures meeting or exceeding the best in commercial ventures. Even the small single-developer projects are normally distributed as source tarballs and generally encourage others to look at and improve their code base. How much more secure can you get than that?

It isn't security that drives web sites to tailor their apps to IE; it's the availability of tools and test resources; sadly, many companies decide it just doesn't pay to double the testing effort to capture an additional 5 or 10% of market share. BTW, Firefox is changing this rapidly as more and more users adopt it (for security reasons).