On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:01, Andrew McIntyre wrote: > I would equate it to EMail, you initially did pay for an email client, > but with time this became standard and free and open source versions > appeared. Eventually it becomes a commodity item. Ditto for browsers, > I can remember paying for first version of Netscape.
This is actually not true. I started using emails even *before* PCs were on the market (using "pine" on the mainframe of the Technical University of Munich, and it was free already then. Switched to various other email clients lateron (e.g. mutt) until the graphical desktops came out and there again I used nothing but free clients (Mahogany, Sylpheed, KMail, ...) Meaning I look back at some 20 years of using email with exclusively free software, never had to pay a single cent for it. The first graphical browser ever was Mosaic from NCSA, which was free too, btw. And once again - I am one of the "oldies" in Internet use, long before it became commercial, when it still was a purely academic (and *absolutely* free in the sense that no for-profit companies were trying to make a buck out of it) - but I never used a commercial browser, nor did I ever have to pay for one. While the commercialisation has brought us some advantages (like convenient access from home), it also has swamped us in unbelievable amounts of crap and the tendency of building toll booths everywhere where we could happily move around freely for the past two decades Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
