In addition to what clavalle said: > Do you actually have the ability to understand exactly what the patch is doing and all of the potential future ramificati

In addition to what clavalle said: > Do you actually have the ability to understand exactly what the patch is doing and all of the potential future ramifications? Do you even get that _chance_ with proprietary software? (Note: I didn't say commercial; you can have commercial, open-source software.) > Open or closed source doesn't matter if you don't have time or the background to deal with it. Yes, yes it does. Mostly because I can pay someone else who does or gain the background myself. This especially true for custom equipment with custom drivers and software. Once the company goes under there isn't a chance at all of getting anything fixed. > Can't you at least recognize that the world more closely resembles Hell than Utopia? If Hell means having access to the shear abundance of software I do, then yes. Take QGis as a singular example. I couldn't pay for Arc; I just don't have those funds. QGIS gives me all the same features for free. While I can't contribute much in the way of code, I do try to help up doing support, helping with docs, writing tutorials, and evangelizing. Ditto for PostGIS (and by extention PostgreSQL) and Grass If free software didn't exist, a lot of the types of work I do just wouldn't be possible.