OSNews

Bugs fixed more quickly? Really? That would explain why bugs languish for years (like the infamous GTK+ button highlighting bug) and why Bugzillas for big projects are filled with thousands upon thousands of bug requests, many of which haven't even been responded to, much less fixed. And that also explains the infamous WONTFIX closures when the devs just don't care about the bug and nobody is paying them to make it work. In the real software world, if customers complain about bugs, they get fixed or addressed. You can still have relationships with the developers, and since they are paid to get things done, things get done.

As for your examples of the benefits of "freedom", they aren't examples of the benefits of FOSS at all! All you did is edit config files or make scripts. Newsflash: you can do that on Windows and OS X too. Except on those systems, you can do considerably fancier things because the system API is much more capable.

And as another poster pointed out, do you actually look at the source code for the kernel? Have you verified that Firefox isn't stealing your data? Did you look through its source code? Are you actually modifying the source code in any significant way to benefit yourself (changing config files doesn't count)? If not, then the "freedom" is of no benefit to you. It certainly isn't of any benefit to most desktop users out there. My sister uses Ubuntu and I can tell you that she isn't hacking on the kernel or fixing bugs in KDE. It might as well be closed-source for how she uses it, which is to say, using it and not spending hours trying to get it to work, which is often the case.