Thanks for continuing this conversation with me. Lets put aside ideology for a moment and talk about facts.

>This is because you're seeing it as some kind of ideology. It isn't. It's a loss leader. You see people doing loss leader all over the place (e.g. milk sold below cost, gaming consoles, television for free but with commercials, etc., etc.), do you think there is a growing trend of people who want to pay you for using their product? Of course not, it's part of a larger strategy. Just like open source.

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. But open source software charge and make a very fine business from support. 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. And what does milk lead to? Cheese? Gaming consoles, yes. But apparently Nintendo never has. Television programming uses the business model of advertising just like a whole bunch of websites do. This does not mean that your television programs are loss leaders because what do they lead to? Consoles lead to games. Programs lead to more programs which the advertisers like cuz they like eyeballs. With advertising you are the product, the advertisers are the customer. This is why probably you get better programming from subscription channels because they are not as beholden to their customers (the advertisers) but this is all beside the point. The example that is kind of true reinforces my point about software being exorbitantly priced.

>Microsoft dwarfs Redhat in every meaningful way. Are you comparing stock prices between the two [1]? And if you want to talk about the champion of proprietary software I think Apple has a better stake on that claim. They just recently blew past Microsoft in market cap (the metric you should be looking at if you're trying to judge valuation of a company).

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. The data I gave you showed that Redhat's shares have outperformed Microsoft's shares over the last 5 years even though Microsoft is phenomenally profitable. What does that tell you? I don't know about dividends, I haven't looked that up. Your talk about Apple is beside the point because I am not talking about market cap. Sure market cap gives you one evaluation of a company but so do lots of other things such as stock movement, volume of trading, price to earnings ratio and a whole bunch of other things. Judging things by just how "big" they are is not a great way to go about educating yourself.

>Redhat isn't remotely relevant to Microsoft. MS is worried about Google and Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if Ballmer didn't even know Redhat was still around as a company.

You are joking aren't? What is Microsft's main source of revenue. It was spelled out in this article. Windows and Office. Has been for years. Redhat competes with Windows in the enterprise. They are a direct competitor of Microsoft's cash cow. 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. 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. 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. Check out http://www.apple.com/opensource/ "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"

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...