Sorry to comment on such an old post....

If M$ made an open source OS, who is going to stop people from providing support of their own? Linux isnt a company, rather its a community. There are many distros for Linux on its own. They really arent there to make money. They have donations.

And pretty much everyone that uses Linux uses it because its not free, because they know what they are doing.

Windows = Training Wheels
Linux = No Training Wheels

Then again... if Microsoft released an open source OS, and relied on support for money, im sure it wouldnt be as open source as everyone would make it out to be.

What about all of us in the computing world that tire of Microsoft in general?
From thier over bloated OS platforms that load your processor/RAM/HDD with unnessecary "services" that the end user never actually uses. Is it really nessecary that the average end user be forced to buy additional components for thier system simply for upgrading thier OS that according to the package thier current system should run perfectly?
For example; I run my own Pc gaming rig, at double the min requirements for Vista, my system is setup for optimal performance with nothing running that doesn't need to be running. vista dropped my performance by roughly 30% on all benchmarks across the board. Is it worth the pricetag to pay microsoft for less performance out of your machine?

There is a large and steadily growing number of computer users now that tire of the rhetoric, tire of the poor performance of high dollar Microsoft OS platforms. Tire of "pay up or it stays broke" attitude of microsoft customer service. In short a lot of us are just fed up with the company. Myself I'll be glad when 'ReactOS' reaches a release state. As for linux, i've never been a fan of Unix architecture but for those that prefer it kudo's for escaping the cluthces of Microsoft.