Transparency, collaboration, increased efficiency, reduced cost, and quick time to value.

Open source means that I can actually help a customer solve his problem.
Open source means that I don't have to worry about a clueless vendor not wanting to fix the problem
Open source gives you the power to build what you want, not what your vendor thinks you need

*We* have better ideas than *I* do.

I told whurley I would avoid humour like "A Heinz bottle with no top", but I lied.
Some years ago all it conjured up in my mind was spotty sad nerds with no social life hunched over laptops in their bedrooms, but nowadays it conjurs up a rapid, vibrant thriving community acting for the common good. Wish we could achieve that in other walks of life.

Open source means install and use freely where ever and when ever. And if you run into problems, go to the project forum and ask politely for help!

Since IBM first published the source code to their OS's, like VM, and then learned that it meant that the customer, not IBM, was going to direct where the OS would go from then on, Open Source is about the customer. The customer can choose to fix their own problem, add their own one off features, or just deeply and truly understand what the product both is and is not. It is the ultimate documentation and the final say. it is also about "helping out the next person".

One recent example: We needed a bug fixed with CentOS 5. We opened a bug, but no one even looked at them. We talked about it, and decided to fix it ourselves. Now we have contributed our fix back to the community for the next person that comes down this path. We had the Documentation, the power, and our having been down that path should help whoever comes along next.

Multiply that by the millions upon millions of lines of Open Source. It is mind boggling.

Freedom and control. Who doesn't like to be the boss?

Insurance (against vendor abuse, disrespect, unjust price hikes, back doors, underperformance...).

A source of ideas (customer dev teams and contractors will be more productive and inspired).

HUGE cost savings.

Opensource to me mens freedom to chose. The most importent thing in the world. Freedom makes personality.

Linux is simple it just takes a open mined to understand...

This, in turn, implies all kinds of things, ranging from "enabling
morons to create bad software by liberallly copying'n'pasting
together whatever comes to close to their line of sight" to
"being able to fix bugs the original code author doesn't
understand". The latter is really painful with proprietary
software: If the responsible manager does not understand the
problem or cannot think of a possible solution, he will start
to make nasty phonecalls to the superiors of the poor person
both understanding the problem and knowing how to fix it. The
same is technically true for 'OSS-project leaders', but those
can just be ignored if need be.

Open Source means that I have total control of my program, except that I cannot cheat and make it mine and then not give the secrets to other, which means that I will not screw myself if I write a bug in the code because a million other coders can correct me; and in return provide the better code to others; unlike proprietary companies which hide their work to then discover that their program crashes; then you must wait months or even a whole year before getting the patch after patch after patch; in contrast Open Source releases patches quicker because there's no money inbetween.

No?

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Open source advances people in the same way public libraries and highways do, except we don't have to wait for the government to improve it.