>Thanks for continuing this conversation with me.

Sure thing, that's what this site is about, no? :)

>Lets put aside ideology for a moment and talk about facts.

I'm not talking ideology, I would claim you are. Personally I care about what works. I care about what should work but I can't make it so and I refuse to imagine it to be so when it isn't.

>Because with open source software you get unhindered access to the source code and because sending bits over the internet is very cheap it is seen as pointless to charge for the media.

Seen by who? Just off the hip, I suspect that most software that's on computing devices today is paid for. I cite the massive profits MS makes on enterprise software and iPhone apps. What are you citing to backup your nonintuitive claim?

>But open source software charge and make a very fine business from support.

? This kind of thing is what really gives me the "back to the past" feeling about your posts. Giving away software and charging for support is a horrendous business model (at least if that's all you have. Places like IBM do make money doing this is an extra to their expensive software). I can't think of anyone besides Redhat to have a a lot of success with it. Everyone else has moved to advertising, freemium or some other technique to make it work.

Have you ever worked in support? Personally I can't think of a worse job in computer science. Listening to unreasonable assholes who feel they can demand anything because they're paying you. If the free software movement wants to tell me that my only option as a software developer (they don't but just to address this idea of making money via support) is to give away my code and be paid to support it, they can go to hell. I would learn another trade before I'd stoop to working in support again. And I love developing.

>Your example of milk is odd because farming is subsidized, something that a lot of people find unfair but that is necessary so that you don't become agriculturally subservient to someone who suddenly becomes your enemy.

Uhm, what does farming subsidy have to do with anything? Places like Walmart pay farmers more for the milk then what they charge themselves. I.e. they seel it at a loss. It isn't Walmart who gets these subsidies but the farmers.

>And what does milk lead to?

Are you serious? You don't know anything about this stuff? I chose the "milk as a loss leader" example because it should be familiar to most people.

Just to educate you on this; go into a Walmart. Do you know where the milk is? It's in the very back of the store. So you have to walk by all their other high-margin offerings to get it. Milk is something you have to get often so it makes a good lure to get people in the store so you can start advertising to them.

>Gaming consoles, yes. But apparently Nintendo never has.

I don't believe this is the case. They may have never sold the wii at a loss but Nintendo is one of the original console players. The wrote the blue print for this stuff, it's hard to believe that they never sold consoles at a loss.

>This does not mean that your television programs are loss leaders because what do they lead to?

They are loss leaders. The product is the viewers, the customers are the advertisers. The programs are the product they produce and then give away to get their high margin product (viewers) in the door.

>The example that is kind of true reinforces my point about software being exorbitantly priced.

Software is more difficult to price because it costs so much up front but costs nothing more to produce once made. I think the market is doing ok at finding the price for it though.

Why do you say "exorbitantly priced"? Have you ever produced anything substantial and found it was really cheap to do? Do you simply think everything should cost less than it does or are you picking on software only (e.g. if you think a BMW should cost so much but software shouldn't then why?)?

>It's not about size. It is about your return on your stock investment in terms of the share price going up and not down, and the dividends on the shares.

You're trying to change the game here. The reason people use market cap as the metric is because it's the best indicator we have. You've found some metric that shows what you want the result to be and chosen that. Do a little more research and I bet you could find a penny stock that beats MS and Redhat.

>Judging things by just how "big" they are is not a great way to go about educating yourself.

It is if you want to know who is more successful. Are you seriously trying to claim that Redhat is out-performing Microsoft? Seriously? That is just utter delusion talking. You were trying to call me out on ideology? I'd like to see MS go down as much as the next MS hater, but I won't lie to myself.

>You are joking aren't?

Are you? Who cares about Redhat?

>Redhat competes with Windows in the enterprise.

Along with a lot of other players. Of all the ones to worry about, Redhat would be the last on my list (if it made the list at all). They're just a support organization, big deal. I'd be much more worried about e.g. Oracle coming in and locking out my platform.

>They are a direct competitor of Microsoft's cash cow.

They have no offering that competes with MS. Be honest with yourself. Redhat Linux usually replaces the other Unix vendors that were there, not even Windows servers. And the desktop? Not in our lifetimes. OpenOffice can't take MS office on head to head and almost certainly never will. I'm sure Office will go down one day (maybe even in less than 10 years) but not to Redhat, come on.

>Apple is too but only kind of because Macos is not a general purpose OS and always comes wrapped in shiny hardware and so doesn't compete directly with Microsoft.

Do you have any idea what's going on in the wild? The landscape has changed over the last 2 years, you seem to have missed it. OSX is very much a general purpose OS. I've replaced all my windows machines with OSX ones in a way I would never have been able to with Linux. OSX is continuing to gain market on the desk and they're crushing on appliances. They're already in any enterprise that does graphics and they're making headway on regular corporate. I don't see them really trying too hard with corporate right now but they have a presence and a leverage point to exploit if they wanted in (IOS). Redhat has nothing to leverage because they have nothing compelling. They're just offering support on a cheap Unix variant, so companies replace their existing Unix vendor with Redhat and forget about them.

>It's more the other way, as Microsoft expands beyond its cash cows it enters the turf of others, into music devices or web search for instance.

That's worked great for them so far...

>And Apple kind of proves my point cuz Darwin and LLVM are open source projects that Apple heavily invests in so gives them a competitive advantage.

Darwin just helps them compete against apt/RPM/etc. so people want a Unix desktop can chose them over Linux. Another loss leader. LLVM is a better example though, but it's mainly competing against GCC.

>"As the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy, Apple remains committed to the Open Source development model. Major components of Mac OS X, including the UNIX core, are made available under Apple’s Open Source license"

Sure, they play nice with open source developers for the same reason phone App developers develop for iPhone and Android. Android sells maybe 50% what you can do on iPhone but that's still 50% on the table, no reason to ignore it if you can afford to produce for two platforms.

>And what about this community? HN is powered by Arc which you can get the source from here: http://arclanguage.org/install and the OS is FreeBSD according to Netcraft: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://news.ycom....

Open source isn't dead. I release open source code myself (and I would release more if I wasn't busy making a living). But your original post claimed the reason MS is floundering is because they don't embrace open source! That has no relevance what so ever. Just playing nice with open source doesn't make you suddenly have a viable business. Ask Sun.