Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Paul Lussier wrote:
> > You know, it just absolutely boggles my mind that people would actually
> > line up to buy an OS, of *any* kind, never mind one from MS. Why would
> > people do this? I'm a pretty hardcore geek, but this is beyond
> > comprehension.
>
> I agree completely, but I cannot help but think that, if people were
> sensible when it came to this sort of thing, Microsoft would have gone out of
> business years ago. A lot of people seem to enjoy being anally raped by
> Microsoft for some reason.
I won't go there! :-)
Seriously, a lot of folks just don't know any better. When it's all you know,
you convince yourself you like it!
As for Paul's comment, I don't find it hard to believe that folks will line up to
buy an o/s. Without open source it makes perfect sense, you either take the
one bundled with the hardware (e.g. VAX/VMS, MS-DOS), buy one of the
available competitors to it (e.g. BSD, DR-DOS), or roll your own. Really,
even with open source you buy it one way or another, either by paying with your
time and efforts to obtain and use open source, or by passing coin to someone
else for their time and efforts (be they M$ or open source).
The big difference introduced by open source is really just the pricing and
the economic model used to set price. Before open source there wasn't really
any choice of models, and pricing was essentially driven by cost recovery (see
ESR's "The Magic Cauldron" for interesting discussion on this).
This involves some interesting issues, I'm planning to review Baruch Lev's
article
on valuing intangible assets (including knowledge assets) in the current issue
of Fast_Company to study how it applies to the open source phenomenon.
Raymond's "Magic Cauldron" may lend an interesting dimension to that study!
--Bruce McCulley
