FOSS has many benefits, but I had always considered the fact that you can "fix it yourself" not to be one. Do any of you fix random bugs in your desktop applications? (Firefox, for example).
It might not be that real of an option for an average individual, but fixing it yourself in a large business could save you millions, depending on how big your IT Infrastructure is.
Think of this example. Company ABC has Windows XP deployed throughout their company. They need to upgrade some hardware, but the new hardware only has drivers for Windows 7 and Vista. Their only option (assuming a lot) is to upgrade to Windows 7 or Vista.
Let's say that they have 1,500 desktops that need to be upgraded. I'm not aware of the details of VLK license prices, but let's say this will cost $150/workstation, including labor to install it. Roughly approximating, this comes out to at least $225,000. This doesn't even count the amount of money they will spend battling incompatible software and hardware issues, after the upgrade.
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Company XYZ is using Linux Kernel 2.6.17, they have a problem with a piece of hardware that only has drivers that work with the 2.6.28 kernel. Company XYZ is a software development company, so they can just use their internal software developers to backport the driver from the 2.6.28 kernel to 2.6.17. They are already paying the developers a salary, so it won't cost them any more cash, maybe just a bit of productivity on other projects. This amounts to a huge savings over what Company ABC had to spend to fix a similar issue.
