>>So.. Organization and motivation and talent. I don't see either camp as having a monopoly here...
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>Let's say (for the sake of argument) that both sides are even on talent, organization and motivation. What about time? A cutting edge company probably can push their guys to do 10-14 hours of work for 6 day per week. If open source can't pay their programmers in the long term, then these guys have to exist on welfare or do it in their spare time. At this point, closed source is ahead of the game.

Evan, I've played that 10-14hr/day for 6-7 days for 6-8 weeks at a time, when I was consulting. It is a meat grinder, and not one conducive to producing good code. One project met a deadline because the project director got a bonus to do so, even though the code shipped was DOA. He was gambling on quick patch turn outs to make some showstopper bugs disappear. He gambled wrong. But, what'd he care. He got his hefty bonus and walked.

You are probably not aware that many coders are paid to work on open source projects, and on the kernel. Linus and Alan Cox are both paid to work on itl, even though both were doing it for love early on. The coders for the StarOffice project are paid to work on it. The KDE team has some paid coders. And, there are A LOT of volunteers adding to the project. The baazar method is extremely powerful and produces excellent code very fast. In fact, many of Microsoft's competitors are giving HUGH amounts of money to open source projects specifically to create software that can compete with MS apps at a lower TCO. IBM tagged 1 Billion, Sun tagged several millions, and others have earmarked equal amounts. And, it is working. StarOffice 6.0 can already read MS docs, spreadsheets, presentation, and write them, as can several other Office apps. Some free, some not. There is a lot of money to be made beyond just licensing the OS or office apps, but not for Microsoft. That's why they are attempting to diversify into the embedded space, the game hardware space, etc....

An aside: The Windows shareware market, if I am to believe some of the WinXX coders who have ported their Delphi apps on Windows to Kylix apps on Linux, is drying up. It doesn't look like the move has been helpful to them. They've encounted apps similar to theirs that have been around a lot longer and do more, and cost less, if they aren't free. My point. Pay for programming markets are drying up, and that includes consultant coding niches. IMO.