Well, lets just say, if your VCR is still blinking 12:00, you dont want Linux.
No one cares what operating system you run as long as it stays up.
The world is beating a path to our door
It's not about ego. Really. If it was ego, I'd be telling you about my awesome... oh, never mind.
The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process.
The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentaly different from those of other products.