On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Jeremy Bertenshaw wrote: > Heres an interesting thought... > > If windows was free i.e. available for $0 would you switch? > > How much of an impact would this have on peoples use of > OSS? if they gave away the OS, but you still had to pay > for the apps?
Price may a deciding factor in _some_ situations, but in the end I suspect it will not be the most important one. The most important feature is _control_: control about what's going on under the hood, control about what features you want or not, control over the file formats you store your data in, etc. GPL gives you full control except for one situation: when you want to publicly redistribute the GLP covered software. BSD gives you full control, full stop (OK, AFAIK except the "credits") Try to imagine China, Russia, etc (Iraq ;-) having to build their IT infrastructure with most of the software _and_ hardware under the control of US based enterprises. I can't. For the same reason I expect that at some stage some non-US hardware will eventually emerge as well; especially CPU, since many other components are designed in other places (the design is what matters not the location of the actual manufacturing plant). For the same reason I don't expect the "trustworthy computer" initiative (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) to succeed unless the control issue is solved favorably (i.e. I am not paranoid on it, _yet_) Go into a parking lot and see how many different makes and models of cars can you spot. Then go into a computer lab and do the same for hardware & software. Then consider that the number of cars and PC's are comparable: IIRC, few years ago it was ~500mil vs. ~200mil worldwide. The IT field show signs of a very immature industry. Cheers, -- Ryurick M. Hristev mailto:ryurick.hristev@;canterbury.ac.nz Computer Systems Manager University of Canterbury, Physics & Astronomy Dept., New Zealand
