"..relying on one company and one system.." -- the same thing     like putting all eggs in one bucket..

@Elena - indeed, except that it is a bucket owned and completely controlled by someone that wants you to buy more eggs or rent a bigger bucket; that may at its discretion decide to replace your eggs with pebbles;  that could and probably will decide that you need a smaller bucket with fewer eggs but that costs more money;  that could at any time take the bucket away completely, leaving you eggless;  that could be taken over by a company that will replace your nice eggs with rotten eggs and then start throwing them at you, sharing pictures of the event with its friends. You would, of course, like to get out of this rotten deal but, once you have moved your eggs into the bucket, they are scrambled by the bucket owner, so you can never get them back in one piece ever again or move them to a different bucket, and you are forced to eat scrambled eggs forever even though you now prefer them hard boiled or you've heard of a great new bucket that offers poaching instead. The issue is essentially one of egg control. The reason I prefer the Wordpress approach is that you get to keep all of your own eggs and can do what you like with them but, if you want, you can pay Wordpress to assure that they remain in one piece, that they don't go off and, if you wish, its chefs will cook them the way you like them.

The other aspect of closed solutions is privacy. As pointed out in this FSF call for donations the proliferation of computers in every aspect of our lives, from home automation to chips in our own bodies, "raises ethical issues inherent in proprietary software". So, closed software is only acceptable where the model of trust is built in other ways. External hosting is as well subject to a model of trust. A Wordpress hosted solution as you pointed out Jon, is acceptable as there is no personal information involved. Things are different when it comes to entire infrastructure as you don't want to have a 3rd party spying on your communication and that's why private clouds powered by open source technologies are becoming popular. As this RedHat page puts it: "Unlike a public cloud, a private cloud is for a single organization. You implement it behind your corporate firewall under IT’s control. A private cloud is great for speeding innovation, handling large compute and storage needs, and securing data".

And Github, HTC, Seagate, Dropbox, Mozilla, etc, etc - it will be interesting to see who *isn't* here. I don't see Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple, for instance.

Here's a school that offers a Minor in Open Source & Free Culture.

Interesting - a whole minor! I see that they managed to get support from various partners for that. We don't have much in the way of resources to put together a lot of courses on our own but that approach seems quite promising.

Some food for thought:

• Yes, given enough money all bugs are shallow: use Coverity:

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix multiple bugs and infelicities in pg_rewind.  Bugs all spotted
  by Coverity, including wrong realloc() size request and memory
  leaks.  Cosmetic improvements by me.  The usage of the global
  variable "filemap" here is still pretty awful, but at least I got
  rid of the gratuitous aliasing in several routines (which was
  helping to annoy Coverity, as well as being a bug risk).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c67f366fa9f748257861ee233b47b80eb5ffa857

• Yes, given enough eyeballs are bugs are shallow: Trusting Tor

What a shocker: Microsoft has published their article on why they run Open Source Program.

India seems to be going further than most in mandating open source rather than simply preferring it. Others are heading in that direction too, though. I was heartened to discover that the government in my homeland has specified both a preference for open source, and that open standards must be followed and all new source code made open - see https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/digital-by-default.  Many other governments have created similar stipulations - Mexico, Brazil, Peru,  and Argentina, for instance.