As Russell has pointed out, it does not augur well to use browsers to measure the standard of internet democracy. Besides the reasons given supporting firefox over IE have cracks. Lemme explain it one by one. Open Sourced and Free: One of the major reasons that the firefox browser became popular is the it is available for free. That is one of the drawbacks of licenses like GPL. Since the source code is exposed, the products have to be made available for free. But if the firefox browser had a price tag on it, it would not have become popular. (IE does not have a seperate price tag because it is included in the pricing of Windows OS). This is one of the biggest disadvantages of open source. Everybody expects software to be available for free. Then how can one expect a software engineer (who already has college debts to pay-off) to earn money and lead a decent life? I don't see a open-source model that harnesses the innovations of lots of individuals as well as that encourages software development as a profession. Feature Rich: The authors have also stated while pitching for firefox is that it is feature-rich than IE and that is because it is open sourced and thousands of man hours have been invested in it by people all over the world . But the reason IE is NOT feature-richer that firefox is because of near-omnipresence of IE (call it monopoly if you want) and not because of the cathedral vs bazaar issue. MS was lethargic in not updating IE because it had a large market share. MS would have updated IE if there had been a competitive browser (even if it was not open sourced). Harnessing the ideas of thousands of people: The authors have implied through their statemetns that open source harnesses the ideas of people around the world. True, but MS also does that. No, I am not a supporter of MS. But the authors need to know how MS makes software before pitching open source software against MS software. MS through their product feedback program and community sites foster participation of the internet community at all levels of the software product development. That is how the Office 12 (to be released in 2006) has come to evolve. Ideas, suggestions for new features are welcomed and are incorporated into the product. Conclusion: The current open source model does not encourage software as a decent full time profession but as a part-time hobby. The current open source model is a boon for the consultants (at IBM etc.) to get more profit margin by doing away with pricing on software and so making the lives of software engineers more miserable. Message was edited by: Terrence Cyril Joseph Anthuvan