I *favor* open source but it isn't an ideological requirement. 'Open source because it works better, not open source because software should be free', to paraphrase ESR. If two OSes are equally good and one is open source and the other isn't, I'll obviously take the open one. If the open source one sucks and the closed one is great, I'd probably take the closed one. In between that is the only area of debate for me - a *little* better and closed? Decisions, decisions. But Windows XP is markedly inferior, while being comparable, to Linux, so there's no debate.

That being said, like all OSes, Linux sucks. And while I have no ideological purity when it comes to open source, I am ideological when it comes to personal computers. I do not come from a Unix tradition and dislike the defense department, academia, corporations, and 'institutional' basis of it, with its groupthink and hierarchies and permissions structures. It's even older than DOS which, in itself, is no crime and can even be an advantage, but Linux is weighted down with Unix's historical baggage, irrelevant cruft, worship of the past, and all the complexity and headaches that creates, not to mention trying to be the OS for every possible scrap of hardware, past and present. (Where, unfortunately, due to the economic structure, it's much better at emulating an ancient mainframe terminal than it is providing contemporary video card drivers and sensible keyboard layouts.)

Microsoft was always evil but there have been degrees. The didn't truly go off the rails with naked vicious tyranny until Windows 95 and beyond - which, incidentally, is when they radically altered their OS. Had they kept their level of viciousness down and had they continued to develop DOS 6 to DOS 10 and Windows 3 to Windows 7 *in the same way* that they developed DOS 1 to DOS 6 and Windows 1 to Windows 3, and they open sourced *that*, then I'd definitely use it. On a great many measurements, DOS is radically inferior to Windows NT or Linux but they are not comparable. DOS is my tradition and is designed for a single user on a home computer which is exactly what I am and exactly what I have. Unix is ridiculous overkill for that. Even if such a system were not open sourced, I'd probably have stuck with it. But if Microsoft shoves me into NT, while becoming more vicious all the while, they put themselves on the same multi-user, hyper-complicated, networking uber alles plane as Linux and lose.

So, as Cruxus says, I'd be *very* interested in an open sourced from-scratch OS but, while I've tried OpenBeOS and Sky and Oberon and so on, I don't see anything out there that's valid in the way that Microsoft, Linux, and even Apple, is.

It isn't open source now and I still have to use it every once in a while... I'd reckon I'll recommend it to people with mentality disabilities (note that I said mentality disability, not mental... ie. people who wants to use a computer but doesn't want to think when using it).

I'd imagine since it's open source, at least some devs might want to take a peek at the code, and some might even want to fix things here and there...

I think Windows might benefit from going open source... but it'll be a -1000 degrees blizzard in hell for MS to release even older versions of Windows under GPL... BSD-style license, I can still imagine... but GPL?! Heh...

Although opensourceness is great, it doesn't mean that an opensource OS will be great... it just happens that our favourite opensource OS is! Even if Microsoft were to open up their sources, and possibly even make them GPLd, it would still not be a good OS in my eyes. I am not pro-Linux just because it is open, but because it is flexible to my needs. If Windows were to be GPLd, it would still have to undergo huge changes to make it suit my way of working.

Were is the option "when hell freezes over" ?

Don't know much about it but I've read that when microsofts ms-dos source code leaked out into the net it was laughed at by the programmers. So, it could happen the same with it's windowed ms-dos. Anyway, I would like to check it out, looking for that strange loop, I think it has, that slows down the system.

That's one of those questions that you could never answer. Things would be so different. If the public had access to the code and could make Windowz stable, then I'd probaby use it.

But most of us come to Linux because we want more from our PC's and we don't expect to pay for it.

I will let my signature say why i chose Linux