Saw earlier on QVC a vinal player to convert tracks to MP3s... and the software it comes with is Audacity - the opensource audio player.

This is one of the first times ive seen open source software coming into the "real world" as it were.

Any opinions/other ones/etc.?

audacity is the best program ever (im not sure if this is relevant )

School now have VLC as their standard media player. Also wide use of Audacity. Yes, open source/freeware is becoming much more prevalent.

am i right in thinking this is free stuff?

if so - one has to remember how powerful advertising is, stuff like wikipedia can run simply because its revenues are huge from advertising alone

gd for the consumers certainly, providing they dont mind the occasional advertising - especially the case in everything now, e.g. tv with channels such as ITV!

Yes, the team I work with have developed an end to end application based on the open-source UltraVNC source code. It's being used at over 100 locations worldwide and is now an essential remote-support tool.

Um Yes just my opinion - I take you you have never seen a Pixar film then ?
http://www.linuxmovies.org/
Or worked in a recording studio
Or used google - yes the backend of google runs on a linux cluster !
Or received an email - 80% of the worlds' email are distributed by sendmail or postfix
and that's not counting the 99% of the worlds internet traffic is routed by cisco which is based on a Linux kernel !

Well when I was posting this post, I was mainly referring to the fact that more consumer faced products are using open source. Most people wouldn't care about google using linux clusters or most email being distrubed via sendmail.

But they would care more that the software that they use and can recommend to friends/family is free and open source.