> I would consider that a side-benefit to FOSS: some other user
> probably encountered it and fixed it and shared the fix and if not,
> well I have the source and can fix.
We must live on different planets, as Barney Frank might say. Mostly when I run into a problem these days (NB: my experience with freely-available software predates Stallman's Manifesto), I find *hundreds* of little nook-n-cranny forum sites with people posting the problem that I have and snot-nosed teenagers telling them that they are stupid for wanting to do what does not work.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090810/011367.html
It's not any worse than what you can get from a vendor; but it's usually not any better.
> The political and social advantage is that GPL software can never be
> taken away from the user by a corporation or a government.
I think we're really drifting off-topic here, but if you're saying that this particular advantage outweighs all the other things that come along with it, then I'm stumped. In practice, this doesn't mean that you're forever happy with software that's GPL'd -- you still face abandonment: old stuff stops working over time, and no one is interested in keeping it running whether you're paying them or not.
This is by far the common case; you can (and did) list a small number of items that people get worked up about, but if a guy like Doug doesn't seem bothered by the tradeoff presented by iTunes, I think you're pretty far from establishing the political angle as being that important.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090817/011439.html
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I see the whole F/OSS world as Just Another Vendor, with it's ups and downs; it's a slam-dunk decision in only a few cases, with software that has such high value and has had such attention paid to it over the years that you'd be an idiot not to use it. But like my Michael Jordan example, it's the exception and not the rule. And for every Apache, there's a Microsoft Excel to counter it.
For the rest: it's usually a slog through the requirements, just like anything else.
/jordan