As a consumer advocate and somewhat self-interested business owner, my evaluation of any circumstance or potential change involves the instinctive question as to how it will affect me, or more succinctly, how it will hurt me and what I can do to protect myself. And so the mechanism that is propelling open-source software into global dominance may not be technical superiority, or freedom, or even an elitist attitude: the driving force may simply be the lust for power and control, or paranoia about what someone else could do, or perhaps just reasonable caution.