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"Enemies of Linux" Trying to Undermine OS?
Pinawella writes "It's reported on VNUnet that 'Enemies of Linux' are trying to undermine the OS with a campaign of disinformation. It's based on an interview with an exec from the Open Source Development Labs, but who are these enemies?"
Terrorists.
Or maybe drug dealers. I forget who I'm supposed to hate now.
Why use Linux instead of OS X you say? I don't have time to learn another *nix which will probably be dead and burried in 10 years. The only healthy *nixes today are the free ones.
We're talking about Linux as if it were Troy. Huge walls, impossible door, massive army, hated by the Greeks and the Carthaginians. The main difference that I see is that Linux is simply an OS (with many flavours of course) made by a bunch of underpaid geeks that don't like Windows. Toppling this pillar of Microsoft-threatening OS shouldn't too hard, you just need to pay more green.
Any student of economics also knows that market forces drive prices down, but not to zero. Rather, to a point of balance between (hello) supply and demand. The price of a product typically starts high then falls steadily over time to a certain point which cannot be accurately predicted in advance, and which can best be described by the old adage "what the market will bear."
People are willing to pay for technology when the value they receive from buying the technology exceeds its cost.
Frankly, the value of Linux is so incredibly low that it has to be given away. If anybody tried to charge for it, they'd go out of business immediately.
Some have tried to apply the business model of giving away a poor product and then selling service contracts to support that contract. Not just companies, either; lots of IT pros have adopted this tactic. "Linux is free, so I'm saving you money, boss. Of course, you'll never, ever be able to keep it running on your own, so I've just guaranteed that you'll spend many more thousands of dollars paying me than you would have spent buying better computers in the first place." It's a valid business plan -- just ask Gillette -- but it's hardly a sure thing. It's predicated on convincing people that it's more desirable to accept an ongoing expense than a capital expense. That's an argument that only works sometimes.
And it's sure as hell not new, nor is it an industry-changing paradigm shift.
Stage #5: Realize that your adversary quotes this claptrap right into the ground too (boss level in warp zone)
Stage #6: MASS CONFUSION!