Are Bad Economic Times Good for Free Software? 357
Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (and thus risking economic collapse), the author wonders if this might not, at last, lead to 'The Year of the Linux Desktop.'"
I think not... (Score:2)
...given that the current economic situation is partially due to excessive corporate control of government and as such, the economy itself. Or is it the other way around?
No Linux on the Desktop (Score:2)
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC. And since there is zero chance of that changing the economy can fall off a cliff and Linux adoption on the desktop won't budge from the ~1% of people cluefull enough to install it themselves and annoyed enough with Windows infestations and other breakage to go to the bother of being an outcast.
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Exactly. The cost of Windows or OS X is trivial for users because they basically come with the computer (depending on whether you go PC or Apple, of course). This could make a difference if it was a common occurrence for people to build their own computers (as many of us geeks do) or if computers-sans-OS's were routinely sold at a discount in stores. But the vast majority of people are saving nothing by installing Linux on their computers. In fact, it would actually cost them MORE in time to install it than
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For the home market? yes.
For corporations? no.
That Sticker means nothing at all to a corporation. It's why we buy volume licenses. Because Microsoft EULA has provisions that large corporations really need to use the VL model. Most of the time corporations not only buy 2X the OS licenses they need, but many time 2X the client licenses as well.
Bundled OS is a steep hurdle for Linux (Score:2)
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC
Either you need to include Apple computers, in which case it's not everyone, or else your definition of PC is so narrow it wouldn't include a Linux PC anyway.
The GP seems fundamentally correct, let me rephrase things. New computers generally come with a bundled OS, Windows or Mac OS X, and consumers generally see no need to replace either OS with Linux. The switching cost does not seem to exceed the perceived benefits. You can argue the consumers are mistaken but the GP's point that a bundled OS is an incredible hurdle for Linux on the desktop is correct.
It would be for sane actors (Score:2)
I mean, you're this close to going bankrupt.
You need to cut costs in every area.
-No more Aeron chairs.
-No more leather recliners in the break room.
-No more M$ software for the sake of it.
But if you've been brainwashed by Microsoft's dorky ads (remember the ones comparing an old version of Office to dinosaurs?), you'll never consider it.
If you're serious about cutting costs, you'll just move to Ubuntu^H^H^H Mint, and use OpenOffice. ("Get used to the icons, already!")
But if you're not, you won't because you
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I mean, you're this close to going bankrupt.
But corporations are FAR from close to going bankrupt. The recession has had a much larger effect on workers.
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You implicitly assume the cost of switching is zero. It's very much not in any business of moderate or greater size, even if you assume the time of your employees doesn't cost you anything (which it does). It's not even low.
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...then again, you usually have to pay those costs anyway (in money or time) every time a new edition of MS Office comes out. This is especially true with MS Office 2003 -> 2007, and is still true enough to count if you go from 2007 -> 2010.
The only real difference is that you pay them in smaller increments more frequently.
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If you are close to bankrupt you, maybe, can switch to FreeOffice. What you can't do include the following:
1 - Switching desktops to Linux. That means extra costs and no actual economy at the short term. You aren't buying new licenses of Windows anyway, nor new machines. You are near bankrupt, remember?
2 - Swithcing to Apache (or to a free DBMS). That implies you'd switch all that old .asp (or sql) codebase. Yeah, it would bring some economies at the short term but also a big spending. No deal.
3 - Switching
Switching to a free Linux is not cheap (Score:2, Interesting)
The cost of switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses. I had worked as a sysadmin before. No one pays sticker prices for Windows, not OEMs and not the enterprise users. The license cost is cheaper than you think. At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users. Next, a lot of enterprise users want an "enterprise" OS with associated support, and this stuff does not come free. (Take a look at support contract
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and what happens when that 1 mission critical software package will not run in linux, fail
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From a licensing perspective RHEL is much cheaper than Windows. Not in the base cost, which is close to the same for Windows Server and RHEL, but Red Hat doesn't ask for seat licenses. That's where Microsoft gets you. If you setup an AD server you need a seat license for every single account (you can go with concurrent use licenses, but you risk someone not being able to get in if you have more users than licenses). That's no biggie with 10 users, but steadily increases, while the cost of RHEL stays the
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Yes and then you have the Virus that is Visual Basic. There are so many programs written in VB that people depend on. If those don't run you are in deep trouble. Now if you look at the server side then yes you could see even more Linux and frankly MySQL and Postgres deployed.. I tired to get one person to move to Linux. I had an old box and I set it for the person at the Church Library to use. All they did was us it to look up videos from a list. I set up everything for them but they stopped using it. Why?
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Also something I've found (Score:3)
There's a saying I've seen on the Internet that is very true to enterprise Linux support "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." I find it to be quite true.
We do multi-OS support where I work (all integrated) and Linux is one of them. It works fine, we've got it integrated in to our central system along with Windows, Solaris, and OS-X, it is managed all that jazz.
However what I find is that making Linux work is a lot more labour intensive than Windows or OS-X (don't get me started on the hell that i
The Year of teh Linux Desktop is nigh! (Score:2)
Apple proves the proposition false ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.
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Where is this sharp increase in Macintosh market share? The latest report (covered here earlier today) puts the Mac at 5.59% compared to 88.29% for Windows. I'd agree that Mac's expensive offerings are still selling well, and Apple is making a lot of money, but not that they're making great increases in market share on the desktop. The iPhone and iPad are their money makers.
Wont happen (Score:2)
The powers are going out of their way to reinvent the desktop and fucking it up every chance they get
Default (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only for a brief period just after WW2, according to this graph:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/us_fed_debt_full.png [usgovernmentspending.com]
A world war seems like a good excuse, though. What's the excuse this time ?
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Modern Monetary Theory (Score:3)
Do we need to carry on that "risk of default"-bullshit? The US never were in any economical risk of default, given their top credit rating. Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history and is worse in countries working just fine right now.
You can go even further. There is never any economical risk of default for a government that issues its own currency and only issues debt that is denominated in that currency. In fact, it is even misleading to think of US government bonds as debt. It's more like a savings account (as opposed to the reserve accounts at the Fed, which are like checking accounts). You can read more about the basic observations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) here [pragcap.com]. Debt/GDP ratios or anything like that really don't matter: the
Desktops will be in decline the next 10 years (Score:2)
With all of the explosion of micro pc's (aka smartphones and tablets becoming prevalent) I don't see linux as gaining in the desktop arena much. But handhelds based upon linux hold great promise. They will come to dominate most of the market I believe. Android phones and tablets will become a large chunk of the tech people use and not desktops. Many of the older people I know are going for a tablet and a smartphone and not bothering with the whole PC upgrade anymore. Most of what they need to do can easily
Maybe (Score:2)
If most companies weren't already exclusively Windows. A wholesale replacement of all Windows computers with Linux computers would be a lengthy and hugely disruptive process, not to mention the costs of retraining and the risks of finding you can't run some enterprise critical software or piece of hardware. A phased replacement isn't much better either as you still need to train people, some of the risk may be offset, but having an IT department need to support two OS's instead of one increases costs.
So in
No (Score:2)
Software License Costs are least of a companies concerns. And if you look in terms of IT Spending you actually see Closed Source Apple and Cloud services coming in full force.
Linux and Free BDS may be cheap in terms of License cost... However if you are going to invest in a business level production system, The difference between $2k for Windows Servers and 0 For Linux is a line item when you are dealing with 30-50k systems. Then it comes down to your current employees skill sets... Besides the popular op
The Year of the Vista Desktop? (Score:2)
According to this news story [techspot.com], Windows Vista has 10x the desktop users that Linux does, yet I don't hear anyone talking about "the Year of the Vista Desktop."
Windows XP, that 10 year-old behemoth has nearly 1/2 of all user desktops around the world, Windows 7 on about 1/4th of all desktops and Windows Vista on about 1/10th - Linux is struggling to make one out of every 100 desktops world-wide.
The poor economy justifies a lot, but .... (Score:2)
Trying to argue that people will switch to open-source solutions in large numbers because of the economic crisis is futile. For the typical home user, a computer system purchase revolves around getting the best deal they can find on something (typically via a local retailer), and chances are very good those machines are still bundled with Microsoft Windows. Alternately, a growing minority of users are making the trek to an Apple store, where they can buy a commercial alternative to Windows with a new mach
No, it won't be the YOTLD (Score:2)
This isn't because Linux is technically a bad choice, and definitely not because it's more expensive (TCO arguments were pretty close to bogus when they first came out, and have become steadily more bogus as more techies have become familiar with Linux). It's because markets for operating systems don't operate in the way that standard microeconomics tells you it ought to.
The 2 big reasons are:
1. The person making the decision about which OS to install typically is not the person using the computer.
2. Apple,
Simple answer ... (Score:3)
A) Those licenses for commercial software are paid for, and if a company doesn't have the money to purchase new software licenses they probably don't have the money for new hardware.
B) Most of the licenses that I've dealt with allow the license to be transfered from one machine to another, at least within an organization and particularly for the types of software that FLOSS can replace. So if a new machine is purchased and an old one is retired, the license is still paid for.
C) If there is an economic crunch, chances are that the businesses are retaining current staffing levels (if they aren't actually going down). So the number of licenses required will stay the same, if not decline. Again, everything is paid for.
D) Retraining and rolling out an entirely different system will cost money. I highly doubt that they would save any money on managing their systems either, since Microsoft provides fairly extensive management tools (many of which I haven't seen the likes of under Linux).
For consumers, (A) and (B) still apply.
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Troll alert (Score:2)
Systems theory defines information as data that causes one to change one's mind about something (it's a surprisingly useful definition). So, since no one on this thread is going to change their mind on account of the arguments presented here, the entire thread is information free.
Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
Fanboys like to brag about 10% marketshare and they have a platform that was fully formed 7 years before the first line of the Linux kernel was written. Apple also effectively had a 10 year head start on Microsoft in terms of ease of use technology. Apple was competing against MS-DOS with a far better system.
"fracturing" has nothing to do with anything. PCs and Android phones are a great counterexample.
Market success is about marketing success. You have superbowl ads, effective TV ads, and your own stores.
Despite all of this, the best that Apple fanboys can brag about is finally breaking the 10% mark and how it's been 20 years coming.
Torpedoed by what Microsoft had to offer in 1991...
Uh-huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely.
When the economy collapses, the first thing everyone will do is run out to become a computer expert so they can install and run linux. Corporations will replace their entire IT staff with people who know linux, and the average person on the street will suddenly realize that what they really need to do to cope with a failed economy is LEARN A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!
Or, you know, people might just keep using what they're using while they hope things get better. Because that will leave them time to work enough jobs to buy food.
no because you can't fix (Score:3)
LoB
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd argue against that because most people do not save money. They spend everything they have. If they save $50 on an image editor, that money doesn't go in the bank... It goes to buy something else.
It doesn't restrict the flow or money at all... It only changes which company gets it.
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This is exactly why the economy is down right now. People are scared to spend unless it's necessary.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue, that as opposed to going into a bank account, money saved by most consumers is going into debt payoff. I know in my family (and several of my friends/kids' school families) this is the case. Skimped expenses are being used to build some infrastructure (home repairs, improvements, a garden, etc.) and the rest is being sent in to creditors.
I am very rusty on my econ 101, but IIRC (likely not) debt paydown is not considered savings (though has a similar result on the overall balance sheet).
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So are you arguing that bank robbers are beneficial during a recession? /troll
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Why another bank?
Why not hold up a bank and tell the teller: now zero my debt balance and no one gets hurt.
(obviously a stupid criminal, but largely those that walk in to hold up a bank fit that description).
Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB
I think you mean this guy [slashdot.org]. He robbed the bank for $1 and surrendered, in order to get free health care in prison.
Jokes aside, the idea that robbing banks can help the economy sounds suspiciously like the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org].
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You mean like the next version of msoffice that requires retraining the entire company?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd argue that people do not save money because there is no point in saving something that is constantly being debased and inflated and devalued.
Definition of money is store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange. They removed one important aspect of it: store of value with fiat that is backed by nothing, thus people do not save.
I know I don't save fiat, I spend it immediately and to store value I buy metals and mining stocks, which from my POV counts as savings (for metals) and investment (for stocks).
People do have savings when money is not being destroyed by the government. Savings are what makes credit possible.
Credit is not supposed to come out of thin air and printing presses. Eventually somebody must produce something and have the value of that production stored and not spent, which then makes this value transferable and available as credit for for investment.
So from my POV, having a product that is of low cost or even, as in case with free/Free software can be had without cost of any license is a good thing, as it allows building up more savings, which can be used for investment, which is the only legitimate way to improve the economy.
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Money not spent on software doesn't magically disappear.
Political decisions (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this depends heavily on the political climate. In most countries, there was a time of two or three decades after the Second World War when wealth flowed downwards overall. It was a slow movement to be sure, but when you look at indicators like inequality, or the share of national income that goes towards wages (as opposed to rents) the trend was clearly in favor of the "small guy".
Then the politics changed, and for the last few decades we have seen the same movement but in reverse.
What this boils down to is that there is nothing inevitable about a flow upward. It comes down to political choice - though one thing that I would agree with is that a government that does not enforce strong regulations tends to favor flows that go upwards.
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However, wealth (the non-abundant variety) always ultimately flows upward. It loops downward a lot, but the net effect over time is that more and more wealth gets concentrated among smaller and smaller groups of people. Such movement is not indefinitely sustainable, so all economies collapse eventually.
Time series over the gini income coefficient [wikipedia.org] (higher number means the rich are richer, so to speak) do not indicate this. At least, eyeballing the graphs does not reveal any trends for me. I know, this is just the income.. it would be nice if someone would care to do the graphs for the gini coefficent of the wealth directly.
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That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.
I would argue though that it can be bad for the US economy, as software is a pretty big export.
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FOSS, as advantageous as it is in value (in many cases) contributes against the velocity of money by allowing consumers to pocket money which would otherwise "move" as a result of bundled software licenses.
That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.
When is Windows thinking not broken [google.com]?
Just in case... (Score:3, Informative)
Just in case people don't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org]
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In that case you might as well give the money direct to the people the glaziers would have given it to.
Same stimulus effect, less broken glass.
That's retarded. You might as well pay them to sit on their butts all day. In fact, it'd be
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
getting money to move from the average consumer is what's needed to drive an economy.
And you know what would do that? Burn their houses down. Anyone objects is basically a traitor to our glorious economy.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Insofar as software licenses are economically efficient and the proceeds of license sales fall upon as many people as possible you could be right. But if software licenses simply impose economic rent and the lions share of the revenues accrue to a few large corporations, which proceed to put the money in their checking account, its not so clear.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
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Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
Open Source actually stimulates economic activity inherently - it makes people more productive. If people are using open source software, it (in most cases) is doing something that they want done, thus freeing up their time for other pursuits, or allowing them to be more productive in the same amount of time.
Open source cannibalizes ... (Score:3)
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc.
FOSS has largely cannibalized the support contracts of traditional Unix vendors and displaced the proprietary versions of Unix formerly used on new equipment. FOSS did not really generate new economic activity, it commoditized formerly premium priced services. Its questionable whether commodity based pricing has increased economic activity, companies at the low end would probably have purchased a virtual SunOS host rather than a virtual Linux host. Now for hobbyists FOSS has been a great boon, but I'm not s
Re:Open source cannibalizes ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
Re:Open source cannibalizes ... (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
Do you remember what it was like trying to search for anything before Google? Everything else was useless by comparison. Let us not take for granted how easy Google made it to locate useful and relevant information quickly. Sure, they are now essentially an advertising company, but their positive effect on the productivity of hundreds of millions of people has been huge.
(Said the guy surfing Slashdot).
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No. Sometimes money is important and so is scalability.
If a system is too expensive to be built, it never will be built. The operational costs will drag down the entire operation to the point where it collapses.
Cheap solutions make some problems solvable. There's really no getting around that.
Fixating on SunOS is a great example because Sun hardware in general back in the day did not scale well enough for some tasks regardless of how much money you wanted to throw at a problem. It's a really poor example to
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Moving money around as a way to grow the economy is overrated. The best way to grow is to actually produce something useful.
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Wait, you're saying we can't grow the economy by just selling each other tulip bulbs?
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Don't be ridiculous; I make very important websites with my college education!
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors, as taxes are imposed whenever money changes hands regardless of whether the exchange is productive. Everyone else benefits most from saving their money until they can make a productive trade, not from compulsively spending it as quickly as possible.
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By "don't want' I mean are socially regressive in some form or another (morally). We tried to ban alcohol, that didn't work out so well, and only produced gangs that supported the now illegal substance. We've made the same mistake over and over again with drugs and prostitution. The solution is not to make things like that illegal, but rather to tax them.
We have a great representative of this in cigarettes, where we've taxed them to a level that now is starting to create its own blackmarket. The tax revenue
Money doesn't just dissapear (Score:5, Insightful)
People not spending money on commercial software doesn't mean that money just up and dissapears from the economy. Those people use that money for daily life necessities like food, utilities and transorrtation so the money goes back into the system but is taken throuhg a different industry.
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similarly, along with the inability to save money goes the almost incessant need to spend borrowed money. not having to buy a $100 Windows license just means most people are creating $100 less consumer debt. Now, some level of consumer debt can be argued as healthy to a stable economy. The current economic constriction is as much from people reigning in debt-spending as being fearful. Economic activity shouldn't get back to where it was before. It was fueled by a phantom home-equity driven debt-spending bin
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"Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else."
Like silly things...
Rent
Bills
Food
I dont know of anyone that is squirreling away money. Savings accounts are losing money as they pay an interest rate that is less than inflation rate.
Everyone I know is taking any extra money and using it to pay down debt. you get the biggest return by paying down debt than saving anything at all right now.
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Yeah, let's break all the Windows.
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"velocity of money"? You're really off track.
Software is like ice. I wrote, in 2003: "Information technology, likewise, is an essential part of todays' business world. In many ways, the IT systems of the last decades resemble natural ice: an incredibly valuable material hacked out with curious cutting tools by a small band of rugged adventurers, transported with great care to distant places, and mainly catering to the richest consumers only. Like ice, information technology has no basic cost: no expensive r
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Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the economy are in fact quite inter-woven. Fearing failure of survival inherently overrides any desire to create new wealth; people will strive to use proven means of sustenance rather than testing new waters when survival is in question unless
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Bundled software licenses merely move money to the rich ruling classes. They can then speculate with it, or blow it on coke and hookers, but that does fuck all for the average consumer.
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What about all those programmers working at MS and Apple? I dare say they are spending all their paychecks on coke and hookers. Okay, maybe Pepsi and Cheetos.
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Broken Windows fallacy? (Score:3)
Pun intended.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Free Software effect on the economy isn't that straight forward. What you loose in money flow you gain in your business ability to grow, and expand.
What free software did do, is make it hard for Software Companies to product new Software. Not all software business models work on the RMS Approved way of making money with Free Software. If your product is easy to use yet powerful, consulting services is out of the question, If your product is small in size, charging for shipping and material doesn't work as well. Some software business will work best if they focus on building the software and someone pays money for the right to use it. But the problem with free software alternatives is that these companies will need come up with a huge advantage over the alternative for it to succeed.
But as I said before that is too simplistic of a view... Because such software companies can alter their program to be one of those newfangled "Cloud" programs where people will just pay for the rights to use it, with using existing free software they can do this much more quickly.
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again, no growth will happen during a recession. Everything will be banked or used to pay off debts to banks and other investors, which will in turn also be hoarded.
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Isn't that just the broken window fallacy? I mean sure, nothing is destroyed but the effect is the same: spending money on software (or a new window) when you could use free alternatives (or keep your current window). Free software is cost efficient software, and efficiency is better for the economy than unnecessary spending.
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Then, magic of magic, someone finds a convenient mountain pass. Right next door. On the other side of a small mountain is a literal forest of trees. Anyone can now get lumber. All they have to do is go get it. The tree planting industry tanks, and a few druids are out of business.
And yet the carpenters have pl
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MS and Apple employee about 95,000 employees between them. I dare say most of those aren't rich fat cats.
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Products are services are wealth, not money. As to 'greedy pig wanting more' - those are people who start businesses and create products and services, well, outside of Free software, if they are looking for profit.
Search for profit is by far the biggest motivator that increased the wealth of people on this planet most when compare to any other motivator, and 'greedy pigs' are the people who are looking for profit.
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Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah the year of the linux desktop...been hearing that for a while.
Free software is mainly useful when you are implementing large quatities of things (e.g. server farms or point of sale terminals or generic desktops for interchangable worker bees. Also it's fantastic for sharing things to other people whoo can't be bothered to buy, say Matlab, to run your stupid script. that's why it gets so much play in acadamia.
but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibil
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"but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibility and variety Linux has."
Not to mention the constant UI changes inflicted on newcomers. It used to be getting a GUI running in the first place was a barrier to entry. Now that Linux driver support is excellent and most distros are easier to install than Windows, the new barrier is frequent UI change.
No problem for geeks, but I don't even bother to interest non-geeks in Linux because unless you are a techy and wil
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Great for linux? Maybe. But the kind of people who would sit around collecting unemployment for years are the kind of people who use Internet Explorer, if you catch my drift. (For those of you who didn't catch my drift, you us
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because linux is only free if your time is worthless.
And Windows is only $169 per license if your time is even more worthless. The constant reimaging, the futzing about with intentionally hidden design features, the 3rd party software that doesn't update automatically with OS updates (where the OSS replacement of said software is in the repos). Linux/Unix admins are only paid more because we have esoteric knowledge. Windows admins do a lot more work.
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You can successfully run IE6 and IE7 on Linux using wine. I have done this for ages... I have not tried running IE8 or IE9 though...
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ok what? most people are going to buy a pc, and whats on there? pretty much everything you need, cd burner applications, movie editors, media center hell most even come with a home version of MS office, anti virus? you know MS has been giving one away for a couple years now and its actually better than most commercial ones right?
linux users are the shacked ones, dependent on whims of egomaniacs, and in a constant state of broken, your constantly having to fight with it, which is fine if that is your thing b
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Never used linux have you...
"pretty much everything you need, cd burner applications, movie editors, media center hell most even come with a home version of MS office, anti virus? you know MS has been giving one away for a couple years now and its actually better than most commercial ones right?"
You just covered what Ubuntu comes with out of the box. Except for the AntiVirus... Linux does not need one.
Oh and Linux comes with an entire software library that is single click install. Thousands of applicatio
Actually (Score:2)
I paid full retail for my first photoshop (version 2.2) back in the day (1994). MS Office? 10$ for a fully licensed version thru my employer (That's professional version, including access and powerpoint).
OS - XP professional came with the machine, I would have to spend a lot of time to replace it, and it WOULD NOT RUN a piece of software on the machine that my company paid 1200$ for.
So, what would Linux cost to implement? No way to tell, because it can not do the job. So once again, the premise is fault
Re: (Score:2)
Linux already won. It's on your phone, it's on your DVD player, it's on your TV. You have more linux computers in your home than you have windows computers.
facts disagree with you (Score:3)
So what is really happening? It's called momentum. Microsoft has trained users over the past decades to accept inferior usability and engineering - not necessarily to Linux in many aspects, but to various alternatives that existed over the years - as the industry standard.