Open Source: many advantages beyond price

“No forced end of life
One of the most overlooked advantage of Open Source is that there
is no real end of life for any project. If a driver is released as
Open Source and part of the Linux kernel your hardware will
probably work out of the box for as long as you care to use that
piece of equipment. In the proprietary world it is common for
hardware manufacturers not to release a decent driver to run older
hardware on newer operating systems to drive sales of newer models.
When Windows Vista was released Creative Labs released a Vista
driver that did not support all the features present in the XP
driver for its older hardware, thus consumer were forced to buy the
newer models just to have on Vista the same features as their old
hardware on XP. This could not have happened if the drivers were
Open Source…”

Complete Story