There it is, I said it, open-source has achieved victory at last!

Well maybe not dead, but its certainly dying. I just spent all day trying to download a demo of a piece of e-commerce software. It's a demo that you have to install locally, so there is no way to "steal" the software. To get this piece of software they needed my name, e-mail, address, and phone number. There are ways to get around giving out your personal information, but not for unpopular sites. Anyway, after giving away my information I was supposed to get a link to download the "free" software. Instead the e-mail I get has a link sending me back to the same form. I fill it out again, and get another e-mail sending me back to the original form. After spending all afternoon going back and forth with customer support I was able to get a link to download the file, but was asked for a license key (that was supposed to be provided in the original e-mail, but wasn't) when I tried to install it. Five hours later, still no working piece of software.

Ubuntu is good, but its no OS X. Open Office does the trick most of the time, but its hard to compete with Microsoft. But, when it comes to software on the web, open-source solutions like Drupal, Wordpress, and Os-Commerce are making huge strides, and are already beating their closed "competitors" in the realm of customer service.