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Free Can Mean Big Money - The Open Source Economy
Gentu writes "People are always accusing Open Source proponents of being communists, but an editorial by the OSNews publisher, ex-Red Hat employee David Adams, takes a critical look at whether Free and Open Source Software is really anti-capitalistic or is, in fact, only a product of the free market at work. Does wide availability of high quality, low cost software harm or help the world's economy?"
I make all my money with free software these days.
I design a database...What do I use? Hmm Oracle? Can't afford it. MS SQL? Can't afford it. Guess it's MySQL or PostgreSQL, with the added benefit that I can charge a couple grand over the liscensing fees for either of those and make nice profit.
Deploy a firewall file server for some business? Win2003? Yea right. Solaris? Too expensive. Linux? I can charge ten grand and beat all my competitors.
Webserver? Apache. Office? Open Office.
MS Zealots can talk TCO all they want, but these people pay me a few hundred dollars a month to keep an eye on their stuff, and it never really breaks. I can admin three dozen boxes by myself, and I'm laughing all the way to the bank.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
He missed a major point in section 7.
LINUX MAKES JOBS.
Its very simple, Microsoft's revenue is $36.8B it employs 55000 it has a high revenue per employee of $669k. It has a monopoly so that high revenue/employee is not suprising.
Other companies are not so lucky:
GE revenue is 140 Billion, it employs 305000, thats $459K per employee.
Citigroup $240K per employee
Walmart $183K per employee...
If companies spend less on Microsoft products and invest it in their own business with similar results to their existing business, then they will create more jobs.
So, if Walmart saves 10 million by not buying Microsoft licenses and switching to Linux
and invests it in its own company, it will likely create 55 jobs.
Microsoft will lose $10m (i.e. 15 jobs). A net gain of 40 jobs.
Walmart jobs are low grade, a more realistic example is Citigroup. 10 million saved on Windows licenses is worth 26 extra jobs.
My point is, it isn't just that companies spend the money on themselves, it's that they employ more people for each $ revenue than Microsoft, so every dollar saved creates more jobs than a $ going to Microsoft.