Slashdot Mirror
Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?
zymano writes "This yahoo article says that almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices and that in a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about 25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux."
I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer.
Indeed, I can imagine the same "geek" a decade or so apart:
20 years old, college sophomore: Dude, everything should be, like, totally free dude. Like the sun, dude, nobody has to like, pay for that and stuff. Pass the bong, dude...
30 years old, wife and 2 kids, mortgage, etc: Shit, man, why can't I find a job? My kids gotta eat!
RMS has written a lot about the economics of open source, but he makes some basic assumptions: that everyone involved in writing software has a foundation grant or academic tenure and the programmer not the user is the best person to decide how software should work and what software should be written. Essentially he totally decouples the producer and consumer. Maybe the world really looks like that from an ivory tower at MIT, but the market in software exists so that programmers can earn a living writing the software that the users want written. The present system, selling software as a product, works very well. RMS and all open source advocates would like to go back to the days where computer operators were the "high priests" of technology. The real crime of the software industry in their eyes is that it brought computing to the "unwashed masses".