Ah yes, the good old OS vs CS discussion. Don't worry, I'm not here to rain on parades, hehe...

Open Source pros - easier to create stable environments because you have the masses to report issues, improve, optimize and trim down code, and have faster response times for fixes because there's forums for just about everything OS-related.

Open Source cons - you have no idea where your code's going, you have to make sure it's held together by something like Sourceforge so all official work is tracked, you want to ensure there's one 'stable' release tree in CVS as well as multiple 'development, try on your own' trees that are not mixed, people can alter it at will and never tell you, and of course, bugs can be found and exploited and never reported but that's harder to do because if one finds it and never tells, another will find it and probably will tell.

Closed Source pros - easy to maintain one official release of code with all sorts of legal jargon meant to scare people who wish to 'decompile' the code and figure out how it works, one central location will house the source code ensuring physical security, and overall is easy to maintain.

Closed Source cons - everything relies on the developers actually FIXING something that's reported. Many times I've seen bugs go ignored for weeks because the developers are too swamped with work on other issues. This isn't good. In OS you can SEE a fix, improve upon it, actually fix it if it's not working up to par, etc. You can't do this as a CS program user. Begging, pleading, cussing out, flaming, etc will be useless because developers respond to those about as much as game developers respond to forum questions concerning release dates. Then you have the one developer who really gives a **** and tries to respond and once the masses see this person as wanting to help, they immediately flood him/her with "Fix this, fix that, this is broken, this needs help", etc. Not to their fault, but because they have someone that's TALKING to them. Companies with closed source generally have VERY tight rules on what's said relating to their product, especially concerning new releases, bug fixes, and the like. Customer support is an inherent problem, as you can see. Companies like MS "say" something's fixed, but because we have no way of knowing whether it's true, we have to TRUST them, and since it's been proven time and time again that other issues have popped up, etc...it becomes a lesson in futility and one I'd like to stay away from.

IMHO, I'm all for Open Source. I've worked on 3 MUDs and the open-source nature of it has allowed people to see my work, offer improvements, etc. We all learned to share in kindergarten, so why not pass that along to the real world of programs? Sure, there are people out there that do nothing more than exploit bugs, create problems, and overall abuse the entire system, but the general populous is a "Do the right thing" group and that's where your benefits go to as well as come from. Closed source offers certain things that Open source can't....but the benefits from OS, IMHO, far outweigh these few things.

OS for life, baby!