Maybe some of you reading this are offended already, but bear with me, I'll get there. The way I see the Open Source model, having worked with OSS at MySQL for 6+ years now, is that this is a great way of developing software. Not brilliant, but great, but I'll get there also.
Users of OSS, in my mind, are OSS users for one or more of three reasons:
- It's Open - The users using OSS for this reason believes that being open is in and of itself a great thing, enough so to use OSS even when non-OSS is less expensive and/or better.
- Cost - OSS is typically less expensive than non-OSS, and this is the reason these users get here. There are then 2 subgroups here, one that represents users that just aren't funded at all, many websites