Torvalds calls flexibility the 'biggest strength' of Linux
I made this same point over the weekend in a post or three. But when it comes from Linus Torvalds, it means more.
When asked in an InformationWeek Q&A how Linux compares with Windows, Torvalds didn't go into a marketing discussion of Feature Y over Feature X. Instead, he discussed the strength of Linux's process/approach over Windows' "We are Microsoft--trust us to be your god" approach:
I think the real strength of Linux is not in any particular area, but in the flexibility. For example, you mention virtualization, and in some ways that's a really excellent example, because it's not only an example of something where Linux is a fairly strong player, but more tellingly, it's an example where there are actually many different approaches, and there is no one-size-fits-all "One True Virtualization" model....
...I mention that as a strong point of open source! Why? Because it actually is a great example of what open source results in: one person's (or company's) particular interests don't end up being dominant. The fact that I personally think that virtualization isn't all that exciting means next to nothing.
This is actually the biggest strength of Linux. When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft -- or any individual company--is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cell phones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.
And what does that then lead to? Linux ends up being very good at a lot of different things, and rather well-rounded in general.
Bingo. If you think Microsoft has a god-like ability to know anything and everything about the market and about how you want to do computing, buy everything from it. Slavishly follow it.
But if you think that your fellow adopters of technology might be more attuned to the market in some cases, buy into a process (called open source) that tunes itself to disparate needs at disparate times. You are not locked into any one vendor's view of the future, or your place in it.
With open source, you help to create the future. That's a very comforting place to be.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The ability to edit source code is great - for programmers. That doesn't do any good for end users who have legitimate needs for the software to perform a certain way, but a) can't implement the changes themselves (don't know how to program), b) can't really even articulate those needs, or c) can't understand what is required to make those changes.
Programmers, on the other hand, are great at programming, but lousy at business analysis (the software engineering kind, not the "MS will be broke in a year" kind - though they're pretty lousy at that second one, too). Since they are in the drivers' seat, users are stuck with what the programmer deems is important - which is usually something entirely different.
The biggest strength with Proprietary software lies in the fact that programmers have real guidance by business analysts and project managers who can actually understand what the end users need. The programmers, on the other hand, have a financial incentive to incorporate these needs in the software, and to use industry best practices when programming. Neither benefit exists with Open Source.
There is a pretty good reason why the best software designs that the Open Source community have been able to come up with are either a) Underlying OS enhancements (Journaling file system - though I think that came originally from a commercial vendor), b) A kick-ass programming IDE (Eclipse, though I think that was a "freed" proprietary project by IBM), or c) a web browser (where the underlying technology came from what was originally a proprietary project).