Open source means what? If you’ve spent any amount surfing the net, I’m sure you’ve heard the term. Open source in essence means free for you and everyone else. You can download X open source program and use it 100% free of charge. You may also copy (send to friends) or modify the program (if your a developer [doesn't apply to regular people] ) with no fear of the copyright police banging down your door.
Open source is a mantra I’ve identified with many times. For quite a while I used Ubuntu Linux, which is open source..100% free for me to copy, use, and modify as I see fit with the exception of logos and branding. 
Open Source is not freeware! Freeware often has distribution and source code limitations. Open source programs like Open Office, Pidgin, and Songbird are great, even awesome! On the flip side open source sometimes includes restrictions on logos and branding just like freeware; It’s often hard to decipher the two.
Open Source is good for the most part. However open source of FOSS (Free and Open Source) advocates are the worst part of open source. FOSS fanatics often preach that any commercial software is bad, even evil and when I say evil I mean devil evil 
. If you follow the FOSS blogs chances are you will see many FOSS blogs and articles post anti-Vista or anti Office or Anti-X developer ad-nasauem. Many just regurgitate the same things others do. Vista is evil, proprietary formats like doc and docx are evil because they seek to profit from technology. The evil of profiting from technology seems to be the mantra of FOSS diehards. What’s so evil about profiting from others mistakes? People have been doing it for centuries!
In part I do agree; My belief has always been that “Education is key to everything for people around the world and the keys to get that education should be free!!” For me a browser and Google are all I need to learn something. FOSS provides that, as long as I have a computer I can install Ubuntu and search Google with Firefox for free.
FOSS is great however the bashers of commercial technologies just because they’re commercial puzzle me. If you’ve got your own thing going with X Linux distribution why bash the competition aka Microsoft? Some of the bashing for example Vista is a resource hog, is warranted however taking a 5 year old computer and expecting it to run Vista is just plain dumb. You don’t expect a DVD player to play Blu-Ray movies do you? You don’t expect a PlayStation 2 to play PlayStation 3 games do you? Why would you expect a 5 year old computer to run a brand new operating system?? It just makes absolutely no sense. The bashers of commercialism in the software realm would realize that had they taken a step back, and shined some prospective light on the subject. NO ONE, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE expects 5 year old technology to utilize brand new technology in any realm except for the slighted (for the their own growth oriented arguments) open source world.
There is a reason why proprietary formats are well in the is because they just work. A MS Word document I write on my computer will display and print exactly the same on my computer as on a the ancient computers my cousin uses at her high school. For the most part my computer will just work. With open source Linux operating systems like Ubuntu chances are this or that piece or hardware won’t work correctly, someone will post a link to some obscure fix some where, and maybe the fix will work. If they fix doesn’t work people in the community will blame the user ie you’re too stupid to figure this out!
Here is a newsflash for you: People want their computers (and other technology) to just work! They could care less if X company won’t open their firmware so FOSS developers can hack a driver for X piece of hardware. They want it to just work and for what ever the reason with Windows it does just work.
On a personal level the very second someone bashes Microsoft or Apple or <insert “evil” profiting company here> in an argument of causation for using FOSS software it discredits the entire argument and quiet frankly turns me off.
