As the industry continues to embrace open standards, the standard to which companies are held becomes more strict. Sun, once considered an open company, is now perceived as closed. At one time Sun's Java license would have been considered generous. Now anything less than the GPL is considered evil. Because it benefits the consumer.
Open source leads to better, less expensive software.
Open hardware creates commodity pricing around hardware. All too often in the past companies would be left hanging when a vendor dropped support for something on which they depended. With open source, that can't happen. No one can ever take the code away from you. You can continue to depend on it as long as you like.