Even the mainstream media is waking up to the fact that proprietary software is no longer viable. While it's far from true that all contributers to GNU/Linux are "working for no pay", it is amazing to see something like this printed in the Guardian:
"The Vista saga has two interesting lessons for the computer business. It raises, for example, the question of whether this way of producing software products of this complexity has reached its natural limit. Microsoft is an extremely rich, resourceful company - and yet the task of creating and shipping Vista stretched it to breaking point. A lesser company would have buckled under the strain. And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?
"Microsofties retort that Vista is much more complex than Linux. But it's not the whole story. It could be that purely networked enterprises like the Linux project are actually a better way of producing very complex products, much as Toyota's 'lean' production system is the best way of making cars."
