[giancarlostoro]

I agree with you entirely. I think the sweet spot is more obvious to me and you: software applications don't really need to be open source, but if the Operating System is, it allows a lot of flexibility, not to say people can't be flexible on proprietary operating systems, but I think for systems utils and kernels open source has strong benefits.

What I really think we're all missing out on is companies pushing more legacy GPU drivers out under an open source license, or opening up a spec for the community to build a correct open source derived driver from at the very least. It's a shame I can have a really irrelevant GPU that would be perfect for a Linux OS (I'm talking ATI level of old) and yet I can't get proper drivers and they wont be releasing any updates but I'm sure the old drivers are probably still functional enough to make my experience on Linux slightly more pleasant.

Engineers need to get paid, and not a lot of people become as successful as quickly with fully open sourced works.