OSNews

I expect Linux to gain a few more market shares, at its own rate. Unfortunately Linux doesn't have the financial backing that Windows has, even if it has a few companies sponsoring it, such as RedHat, Novel, etc...

The rationale is that as Linux gets more contributors and financial backing from donations or support sales, it gets better. For Apple and MS, it's the opposite: they gather the money needed to get the product they want, they market their product, sell it, pay their bills, reinvest some of the money into further product improvement and keep the remaining profit.

I'm sure many people who use an open-source OS don't see the point paying $49 for an annual tech support, if they can get fairly good free tech support online. So they don't pay and don't contribute to the development of Linux. I'm sure if major players of the Linux community gathered money to develop a really good Linux OS and charged $49 for the OS, people would buy it. Heck, $49 is nothing compared to your daily expenditures. The product would be developed more professionally, it would be more attractive, easier to use. Forget Gnome and KDE. Forget intricate terms and conventions. Ease of use. Eye-candy. Turnkey operating system. People would actually use it. It would be to operating systems what Firefox is to browsers. There would be ONE main desktop-oriented Linux, not hundreds of similar distros. The profits could be reinvested in their entirety into the development of the OS itself.

At one point, there would be so many users that the investment would have been reimbursed, and the product could be freed and opensourced. The small percentage of users who would purchase addons, DVDs, support, would be enough to keep sustainable development going. People have no problem to pay when they see a value in their investment. But this rationale is incompatible with the opensource philosophy...