] Despite the rivalry, Microsoft is keen to talk up its
] love for the competition, One Microsoft employee even
] went so far as to say Linux having a 50 percent market
] share would be good for Microsoft. "At least if Linux
] takes off, their viruses will propagate and we won't
] be seen as the bad guys any more," he said. Tipp
] equally sees advantages to Linux taking off. "We think
] Linux is great," he said, adding that competition from
] the penguin and associates keeps the Microsoft on its
] toes.
]
]
] Open-source users, however, aren't quite so overflowing
] with praise, he said. "We haven't talked to a single user
] who has said they're using [open source] because it's
] better."

hm, thoughts on this?

what products are actually better in OSS than their proprietary counterparts? does it all come down to price/performance?

i certainly believe that OSS is better insofar as it provides variety and choice, among other reasons, but is an OSS database system ever gonna truly compete with Oracle, DB2, or Sybase, for example? (I'm not indicating that they don't -- i know nothing about dbase performance rankings -- it's a real question).

Presumably it all comes down to your definition of better. Price/performance is one factor. as i've aged and spent days and years of my life with computers of all kinds, i've reached a point where ease and reliability are more critical than cost, motivating me away from linux for day-to-day activity. but i won't be buying an XServe for my mp3 collection anytime soon, which i guess puts me into the class of user where linux is a development and lightweight server platform.

anyone else have thoughts on this? or on what microsoft can learn from OSS?

ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'