Sun's Jonathan Schwartz talks about the idea that computing is a commodity:

Andrew Morton (of Linux kernel fame) gave a low energy speech in which he said "Operating systems are commodities, now we're moving to commoditize the rest of the stack." He made those statements as if to suggest "commodity" meant "no longer of value." I don't think Andrew understands commodity markets. Here are a few: oil, gas, financial services, telecommunications and electricity. Commodity markets are the biggest and highest value markets in the world - because they represent products and services for which there's global, perpetual demand. They tend to be markets won or lost based on research and development (check out the largest R&D spenders in the world, they're almost all serving commodity markets). Computing may be a commodity - computers, and their operating systems, are most certainly not.

And the WSJ's freebie today is "Linux Feels Growing Pains As Users Demand More Features."