&lt;blockquote&gt;That’s the way of making enough money to cover for the investment.&lt;/blockquote&gt;
I wonder when will Microsoft make enough money to cover their investments so that they can offer competitive prices for their products.


Anyway, I think your analogy is flawed, because whatever you do, you will only do it if you want to do it. You will only be good at it if you enjoy it, and you will always have to spend time to accomplish something.
Altho the recepies thing might apply for (for example) pagerank it really isn't rocket science for maybe 99% of software.

Just because people have the recepie and ingredients, it doesn't mean they want to spend time cooking, learning and perfecting it. And if you want something different you will again have to waste more time learning and perfecting. It is not as easy as one might think, and this is why people specialize in one or two areas. You can't make everything by yourself.


As for Open Source vs Proprietary, someone at Microsoft said there is no such thing as free software, and this is partialy true. The reason is there are people who are paid to develop software such as ubuntu, open office, firefox, eclipse, sugar crm, mysql and so on.. The companies that develop the software just have different revenue sources, and maybe have a more realistic profit margin than Microsoft for example.

Also, I think that every project is a different project, and that the decision of open source or proprietary should be based on the project itself, and not just because proprietary is this an open source is that.