Why Use Free/Open Source Software?

An Anonymous Coward writes "I came across Why Use Open Source / Free Software? at Linux Today. As the author says in his intro: "This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using Open Source / Free Source software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures." Good to see stuff we've known / suspected for some time backed up by real data...."

Comments

Because it's better

[magicslax]

Good to see stuff we've known / suspected for some time backed up by real data....

Looking at a bunch of graphs deoesn't explain why I use Free Software solutions. Apache's market share might be impressive, but that's not the reason I use Apache on my server and linux on every box. I use Free Software because I like what Free Software has to offer. Even the article's "Non-Quantitative Issues" doesn't adress user preference. Gnome just Feels Good to use and would likely be my choice regardlesss of any superiority of licensing or cold hard technical superiority.

Free as in pirated?

[AndrewCox]

Why use free/open source software when you can get the commercial software for free?

We've all heard how software pirating hurts the commercial software industry, but how about the cheap bastards that would otherwise be using free/open source applications?

And just for comparison ...

[__aasfhc1949]

Here's a link to a microsoft.com article on why the Windows 2000 Server is better than Linux:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Embedded/sak/eval uation/compare/advantage.asp

Re:The article is missinformed.

[epsalon]

IE is a better browser?!

Well, IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:

7.2.1 Type
[snip]
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]

Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.

Therefore, IE6 is not a "web browser" and thus cannot be the "better" browser.