The idea of giving information away for free is a hot topic right now with internet piracy and licensing being the issues more with entertainment venues (music, movies & torrents oh my!).
But who doesn't love free stuff? I looked up the meaning of Ubuntu the other day, According to Wikipedia:
The name of the distribution comes from the southern African concept of ubuntu which may be rendered roughly as "humanity toward others", "we are people because of other people", or "I am who I am because of who we all are"
In all I think the idea of Open-Source and Free Software is a good idea, but because it essentially relies on peoples willingness to commune and contribute with no deadlines, or direct financial encouragement I think they will continue to lag behind Microsoft in lots of ways - but I can feel them catching up in a lot of ways too... I think about the years since that movie was made how far the technology has come. It should be interesting what the next 5 years brings for open source. My predictions is that as free technology reaches more people, more people will be able to contribute to free technology and as more people develop it, GNU and Linux can only get better.
Also from Wikipedia:
The cost to redevelop the Linux kernel version 2.6.0 in a traditional proprietary development setting has been estimated to be US$1.14B
