...but, crucially, availability of source code means that there is an alternative to banging your head against the support brick-wall. It also allows an additional level of due diligence in checking software functionality and design at the acquisition stage, which in turn ought to make it clear how possible in-house fixes will be to undertake.

This discussion is also leaving out one of the main reasons that large software and hardware vendors are becoming so keen on FOSS. With software complexity on the increase, it no longer makes sense to engineer solutions from the ground up. Even in competitive spheres like the mobile device/OS market, a certain level of commoditization benefits all. Then device manufacturers can pour more of their R&D money into 'differentiating technology' - ie sexy interfaces and novel use cases, the stuff that actually sells phones. I was at the FOSS in Mobile conference in Amsterdam back in September and Ari Jaaksi was calling for greater harmonization of the various mobile Linuxes - not for reasons of brotherly love but because the duplication of effort going on is just pure waste. LiMo and Android and Maemo will all compete better with OSX Mobile if share more low level components.