As I've said, "open source" and "free software" are EQUAL but they are not EQ. The provenances of the two philosophies are different, but they produce the same kinds of products, operate the same way, and have loosely the same goals. Neither open source nor free software have any notion of what it means to put ease of use at the forefront, and their user bases all suffer for it. The GIMP is an open-souce UI success story . It's still a joke by any reasonable standard, but compared with the sea of open source software out there, it's really quite remarkably usable. If GIMP is representative of the best that open source can do from an interface standpoint, then open source will continue, and deserves, to languish in obscurity. As for whether the Stallmanites can produce a usable product, I have just two words for you: GNU Emacs. It's no surprise that today's programmers pay for text editors that function elegantly and integrate seamlessly with the Mac environment. One more comment on "dongles, key disks, TPMs and the like." If those things worked, you wouldn't need a DMCA anti-circumvention clause. As Bruce Schneier says: "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." Tell that to Gerhard Lengeling, whose Notator software for Atari ST remains uncracked to this very day despite being still in high demand amongst its target audience -- professional musicians. Half the development effort was invested into just the copy protection system