The big winner? Open Office. It swept the awards for top project, top enterprise project, and top project in education.

The bottom line is things are about as bad in programming as in anything else. But if you know open source you have a cost-cutting story to tell, and that might keep you employed a bit longer than your Microsoft-loving buddy.

Open source projects in Fortify's Open Review report fewer defects per thousand lines of code than proprietary products in the same review.

Louis Suarez-Potts, who is community manager for Open Office, suggested that many users disdain open source because they can get proprietary titles "for free."

How can open source achieve the breakthroughs it needs and beat Apple at its own game?What about cash and fabulous prizes?

Why wait for the lawsuit to be filed before taking appropriate action, or at least responding to the SFLC? Is it that any publicity is good publicity? After all the suits of the last year do vendors still think the SFLC is bluffing?

The Fortify study did not say enterprises must avoid open source because all open source is a security risk. But that's how lazy reporters played it.

The vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin still holds. In a word, search. In another word, find. Maybe its cloud will bring a third word, host, but so far it is mainly a set of services built around that one word, search, again.

If every show is a trial, users are the jury. You make your decisions signing support contracts, ordering online, in stores, in what you tell your friends. Without you there's no show.

Ship everything the average user might need, in other words, at a knock 'em dead price. Turn it on and it runs. You can load it up with ads for support offers, and other downloads you're not including.