My non political contribution
My personal feeling on OSS, it opens up the world of software to even those who cannot afford $oftware. With out apache, nobody would be running a personal webserver because they couldn't afford netscape enterprise server. Without linux/*BSD there would be very few unix admins, software geeks, and budding developers. OSS gave internet to the people, think of how small the internet was before OSS existed, it made the internet more accessible. In my opinion it created the dotcom boom. Without OSS think of how many projects and networks wouldn't have been able to even get past the planing stage. OSS made it easy to take commodity hardware, alittle bandwidth and create something that impacts the world. Think google, thats how they started.
I'm not a linux user, infact I don't like alot about linux, but fact is redhat 5 and freebsd 2.x got me started. I personally think alot of OSS is crap, kludgey, hard to work with, hard to get working and maintain, but there are also things like mysql, apache, php, bind, qmail, postfix, firefox/mozilla/thunderbird, BitchX. Those things allow me to do my job and more, they are all great products. To me that is what OSS is all about.