On Mon, 09 Jun 2008, Sarad AV wrote: > > B. Avoid monopolies. If your friend uses Gmail then insist on using > > Yahoo! and complain loudly if the two services do not co-operate. > > More choice is mostly better! > > Its designed not to work. All the 'free extra services' can be > exercised only if you stick to one of them. Using two different > services for the same thing now becomes grossly inconvenient.
A lot of things appear to be inconvenient until one tries them out! Look at what someone else said. On Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Akarsh Simha wrote: > It's more a matter of choice. I prefer free software by choice, > convenient or not. The cost of freedom is that you need to exercise your choices. Occasionally, this means giving up temporary conveniences. To come to the example at hand. Suppose everyone decides to go with gmail and googlegroups. Suppose that this causes Yahoo! to fold up its e-mail services and so on. Suddenly, it becomes practical _and_ profitable for Google to start exercising its monopoly![1][2] Accepting the temporary incovenience of connecting to the 'net with slirp and a reduced capability network stack, allowed us to setup mail services in 1992-93 at School of Maths, TIFR using GNU/Linux. Thanks to Pablo Ares Gastesi that is now a full-fledged LAN running GNU/Linux. (See http://www.math.tifr.res.in). Luckily for us all, his effort to circumvent the inconvenience was not the only one but was replicated a thousand times over across the world. As a result, circa 2000 it became more *convenient* to set up basic services (DNS,mail,web,...) using GNU/Linux or *BSD than with any of the proprietary systems. So if one believes that Web 2.0 or network-based shared-resource computing is the way of the future then the time is ripe to: (a) ensure interoperability of the proprietary providers and (b) setup (or provide software resources to setup) community supported service providers This may be a bit inconvenient in the short term but will benefit everyone in the long term. Example: Open Street Maps! Regards, Kapil. [1] This is not specific to Google. If the roles of Google and Yahoo! were interchanged, this would not really change the story. [2] In fact, Linux users should be happy that there is FreeBSD/OpenBSD which can throw up different (and sometimes better!) ways of doing the same thing. Thus Linux is not allowed to be a monopoly either. :-) --
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