As a long time marketer I can assure you that we ruin everything. email spam, ugly banner ads, interstitials, SEO manipulation, retargeting, on and on. We do it because it works. Even paid twitter followers work. Robocalls work. Blatant sex works (works really well). When Congress gets involved all that happens is we have to pay lobbyists to make sure we can get around any laws or regulations. When we find ways to make you aware of our clients or their products, when we find ways to make you like us, when we find ways to make you engage with us, even if the response is a very low percent, we will do it.

Stop me before I annoy you again.

For your situation it depends on a few things. First is how your overall business works. If the server farm is just a small part of the cost of your business, and your product is strong, saving a few bucks on the servers won't matter. But if your business is mostly driven by the server farm and it is a large percentage of your companies expense, you will find out if you are right soon enough. What will or will not happen is that one of your competitors will use an OSS implementation to lower their costs. True, they may have problems in stabilizing it, but they may not. In any case, if they can operate more efficiently that you can, you will have to change. If they cannot operate more efficiently than you can, then you are absolutely correct.

You are saying the same thing many UNIX companies said about Linux many years ago.

First language I learned was LISP. Second was assembler for an old Univac machine. Then SPS and Autocoder for the IBM 1401. Then BAL for the 360 and finally FORTRAN. After college and the military I got into C (in 1972). C and LISP served me well until I got onto a project using SMALLTALK. SMALLTALK was really fun, but I think it was the nice IDE rather than the language that made it fun. By the mid 90's OO was all the rage and as the education factories started turning out Visual C++ experts it looked liked C++ would be the language forever except those Visual C experts could not create a class library to save their lives. They basically used it as a procedural language but there was great confusion as many people believed if it was written in C++ it was OO by definition. OO was what the cloud is today. A clearly defined environment, with all of 12 people really getting it, and thousands thinking they do.

My thinking is that LISP was a great language to start off with for many reasons. These days I really like Python for general stuff, and I have not been close to a programming project in years so have no idea what is best, but would look at the tools first.

By the way, assembler and machine language doesn't help. The theory is that if you understand the machine internals and architecture your code will perform better. Not true. Understanding the machine does not prevent you from designing a web app that requires 50 DNS lookups, 150 database calls, and 150K of javascript for the first page. If you like to drive a stick, you should learn assembler, you will like it. If you want a car with all sorts of gadgets and fly by wire, you do will find assembler very boring.

So I think CMU is on the right track. But there is one last thing I have noticed over my many years in the industry. Whichever language you learn first will likely be the one you favor forever.

Is it pedantic to point out that speed and bandwidth are different?

Common access to source code improves security. I cannot believe Microsoft does not know this. I cannot believe you do not know this. Microsoft does not employ enough people to find and fix all their security exploits. They need help.