Somebody has to consume your product or there is no reason to build it. If OO wants to compete with a high-quality commercial product, they should act like it.

Somebody has to consume your product or there is no reason to build it. If OO wants to compete with a high-quality commercial product, they should act like it. I use Windows and Office because they are superior products, with enough of a quality increase that I'm willing to pay for it. I really doubt people would mind shelling out their hard earned cash for Desktop Linux or OO if they were viable alternatives, but as it stands: they aren't. I'm fine with being a producer in a few of the fields I care about (I work on one of the few remaining Perl BBSes), when I'm not busy getting paid to write software. I don't want to have to help write my OS, my Office software, my text editor(s), my web browser, my music player, etc. I just want these things to work in (at least) a predictable fashion. Anyway, I really do think that the open source community needs to lose the attitude if they ever want to gain traction in the wider non-programmer community.