What you say is true, of course. However, that doesn't invalidate what I am saying. Many niches are being overrun by open source. Eclipse, as I mentioned, is one very new strong contender in the EDA framework arena, and it's giving Synopsis and Cadence fits as they reposition to try to hold on to their captives. gcc is another. How many closed-source C compilers compete with gcc? A lot fewer than used to!

While it is true that Microsoft shows no signs of dying, we are irritating the dinosaur immensely. They are being forced to work for their money as opposed to stealing from corporate, government and consumer babes.

I am seeing signs of growth in a very significant trend: programmers being paid to work specifically on open source development. For many years, companies like Yahoo and Walnut Creek CDROM paid developers to work specifically on FreeBSD. This trend is widening, to the point where I have now seen several examples of senior programmers with reputations (Poul Henning-Kemp, for example) collecting money from the community to work on projects. Another very healthy sign is that Ton Roosendaal succeeded in getting the community to help him financially to release Blender.

I believe the thing to watch for is userland and user-corp contributions to projects, not old-style software companies. MySQL is a formalized company, but there are other projects which are starting to look for and get money to develop.