Are Bad Economic Times Good for Free Software?

Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (and thus risking economic collapse), the author wonders if this might not, at last, lead to 'The Year of the Linux Desktop.'"

Comments

Why?

[gcnaddict]

I'd actually argue that free software is bad for the state of the economy on the basis that it doesn't increase the velocity of money. Organizations which exist to support FOSS and free technologies encourage the movement of money, sure, but getting money to move from the average consumer is what's needed to drive an economy. FOSS, as advantageous as it is in value (in many cases) contributes against the velocity of money by allowing consumers to pocket money which would otherwise "move" as a result of bundled software licenses.

Bad economic times are good for anything cheap or free, which in turn ever-so-slightly discourage economic recovery by moving less money than would otherwise be spent for a particular good or service.

Re:Why?

[Aladrin]

I'd argue against that because most people do not save money. They spend everything they have. If they save $50 on an image editor, that money doesn't go in the bank... It goes to buy something else.

It doesn't restrict the flow or money at all... It only changes which company gets it.

Re:Why?

[ThoughtMonster]

Money not spent on software doesn't magically disappear.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Not in a recession. People who lost 401k savings will salvage anything they can by limiting other expenditures. Therefore, money saved on an image editor will in fact go straight to a bank during a recession.

This is exactly why the economy is down right now. People are scared to spend unless it's necessary.

Re:Why?

[AvitarX]

That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.

I would argue though that it can be bad for the US economy, as software is a pretty big export.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read up on Opportunity Cost

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Addendum to my previous comment: The point you're arguing is valid when consumer confidence is returning or already established; money saved in one area will indeed go towards other expenditures. However, when consumer confidence is non-existent (e.g. right now), that money isn't going anywhere other than a savings account, if not under a mattress (if the user doesn't feel burned enough by banks as-is).

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

getting money to move from the average consumer is what's needed to drive an economy.

And you know what would do that? Burn their houses down. Anyone objects is basically a traitor to our glorious economy.

Re:Why?

[maxume]

I'm pretty sure if you accurately counted dollars and cpu cycles, open source software would show up in commodity business expenses a whole hell of a lot more than it would show up in households.

Re:Why?

[iluvcapra]

Insofar as software licenses are economically efficient and the proceeds of license sales fall upon as many people as possible you could be right. But if software licenses simply impose economic rent and the lions share of the revenues accrue to a few large corporations, which proceed to put the money in their checking account, its not so clear.

Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.

Re:Why?

[tepples]

FOSS, as advantageous as it is in value (in many cases) contributes against the velocity of money by allowing consumers to pocket money which would otherwise "move" as a result of bundled software licenses.

That's the most broken windows thinking I've seen in a while.

When is Windows thinking not broken?

Re:Why?

[Arlet]

Moving money around as a way to grow the economy is overrated. The best way to grow is to actually produce something useful.

Re:Why?

[noobermin]

And a $50 image editor is necessary. May be they simply won't buy the software and do without having a good which really isn't a commodity (unless they are a graphic designer, perhaps)

Re:Why?

[alvinrod]

Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else. If there's one thing that stands out about the American economy as a whole, it's the inability for a large number of people to save money. That $100 is just going to be spent somewhere else. In some cases the ability to use FOSS will allow people to improve their business, where they might not have been able to do otherwise. The money that they can potentially save with FOSS products, whether it's an OS, web server, or productivity software can go towards other parts of the business.

The ability to do things in a more cost-effective manner is what drives business as a whole forward. No one is sitting around crying about the woes of the blacksmith whose enterprise was destroyed with the advent of the automobile. We're too busy using our cars and other vehicles to enhance our own lives and make things which were impossible before the automobile, e.g. long commutes, largely trivial. If Microsoft's business model is less viable, I won't lose any sleep over it. Either than can adopt, or die at the feet of progress. If they don't, the world in one hundred years will care no more than we care about the buggy makers of a hundred years past.

Re:Why?

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, let's break all the Windows.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you're saying we can't grow the economy by just selling each other tulip bulbs?

Re:Why?

[lupis42]

Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.

Open Source actually stimulates economic activity inherently - it makes people more productive. If people are using open source software, it (in most cases) is doing something that they want done, thus freeing up their time for other pursuits, or allowing them to be more productive in the same amount of time.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else.

Right, unless it's a recession, when people are doing whatever they can to rebuild what they lost. In this case, that's $100 that won't be spent at all.

Re:Why?

[royallthefourth]

Don't be ridiculous; I make very important websites with my college education!

Re:Why?

[pieterh]

"velocity of money"? You're really off track.

Software is like ice. I wrote, in 2003: "Information technology, likewise, is an essential part of todays' business world. In many ways, the IT systems of the last decades resemble natural ice: an incredibly valuable material hacked out with curious cutting tools by a small band of rugged adventurers, transported with great care to distant places, and mainly catering to the richest consumers only. Like ice, information technology has no basic cost: no expensive raw materials, no inherent limits on production. Ice is simply the solid form of one abundant matter, and information technology is a solid form another abundant matter, namely the human intellect."

When ice is free, you enable huge industries on top of it. Same with software. Free software underlies the Internet, for one thing. Velocity of money? No, it's about velocity of knowledge, freedom of the market, lower friction, and overall more wealth.

Re:Why?

[couchslug]

Bundled software licenses merely move money to the rich ruling classes. They can then speculate with it, or blow it on coke and hookers, but that does fuck all for the average consumer.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please remind Apple and Microsoft of the velocity of money.

Re:Why?

[should_be_linear]

Yeah, move, rigt into Bill Gates pocket, right!

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Nobody's going to risk creating a new industry when banks and other financiers won't loan them the money needed to pay employees to get those ideas off the ground. Everything grinds to a halt when people want to make sure they survive.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the economy are in fact quite inter-woven. Fearing failure of survival inherently overrides any desire to create new wealth; people will strive to use proven means of sustenance rather than testing new waters when survival is in question unless all other methods have already failed.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

They're paying employees. They're paying universities for research. They're hiring. They're licensing other technologies from other companies which in turn perpetuate the cycle, etc.

Re:Why?

[Lumpy]

"Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else."

Like silly things...

Rent
Bills
Food

I dont know of anyone that is squirreling away money. Savings accounts are losing money as they pay an interest rate that is less than inflation rate.

Everyone I know is taking any extra money and using it to pay down debt. you get the biggest return by paying down debt than saving anything at all right now.

Re:Why?

[jellomizer]

Free Software effect on the economy isn't that straight forward. What you loose in money flow you gain in your business ability to grow, and expand.
What free software did do, is make it hard for Software Companies to product new Software. Not all software business models work on the RMS Approved way of making money with Free Software. If your product is easy to use yet powerful, consulting services is out of the question, If your product is small in size, charging for shipping and material doesn't work as well. Some software business will work best if they focus on building the software and someone pays money for the right to use it. But the problem with free software alternatives is that these companies will need come up with a huge advantage over the alternative for it to succeed.
But as I said before that is too simplistic of a view... Because such software companies can alter their program to be one of those newfangled "Cloud" programs where people will just pay for the rights to use it, with using existing free software they can do this much more quickly.

Re:Why?

[elrous0]

What about all those programmers working at MS and Apple? I dare say they are spending all their paychecks on coke and hookers. Okay, maybe Pepsi and Cheetos.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Debt is paid to who, again? Banks? Maybe some utilities which aren't expanding?

That money isn't moving anywhere. Banks are scared to lend. What's your point?

Re:Why?

[gmuslera]

Depend what you call "economy", if it is money from everywhere somewhat dissapear inside the ivory tower of a corporation, maybe it won't help a lot of people. In the other hand, free software mean more services built around that software popping everywhere, or more available cash for the user of that software to use it in other places.

Re:Why?

[elrous0]

MS and Apple employee about 95,000 employees between them. I dare say most of those aren't rich fat cats.

Re:Why?

[OglinTatas]

So are you arguing that bank robbers are beneficial during a recession? /troll

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Are they going to spend that money, or will it go towards paying an existing debt or loan with another bank?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your circular logic is astounding. Please! Tell us how bad economic times are good for the proprietary software industry! You sound like you work for Wall Street...

If anything, bad economic times makes people examine what is in fact most important to them in their personal and professional lives. Having the majority of the population do that is probably something you're against, strictly judging by your post.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

What you loose in money flow you gain in your business ability to grow, and expand.

again, no growth will happen during a recession. Everything will be banked or used to pay off debts to banks and other investors, which will in turn also be hoarded.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

Aaaaaah, beautiful. The above comment certainly deserves the "+4 Interesting" moderation that it has because it is a fine tuned demonstration of absurdity, to which economic illiteracy takes a Keynesian follower, and the above comment is definitely Keynesian in nature, even if the commenter himself doesn't immediately recognize it as one.

Think about this, just like the worthless, completely worthless Krugman, who says that people need to be hired by government, who must create worthless jobs just to cause this 'velocity' of money, the above commenter puts the money above the product. Worthless paper above an existing product.

The reasoning about economic wealth is transformed from: people need things, and that's why they work in the market. To: people need to work, no matter what the work is, even if it is worthless, as long as there is this 'velocity' of money.

Any product that already exists increases economic wealth. If the product is sold at a price, which is efficient to the market participants, then it's a good deal. The Free Software qualifies perfectly. It is given away, the part of the deal is that the code becomes Free and cannot be locked and stolen from the public domain basically. So it's a product, upon a company can rely and spend nothing for the licenses - that is extremely efficient. If more products were like this, the economy would be much more efficient.

The goal of the free market is lowering of the prices, not hiking of the prices, as the Fed wants you all to believe, so that the Fed can justify printing the money and causing inflation, which is what governments want. Governments are huge debtors, especially governments of the West today, especially USA. So governments want inflation, and that's what they create with money printing.

Effect of inflation is rising prices, which is the opposite of what free market provides - lowering of the prices and increase in choices and efficiencies. The goal of an economy is to provide the required choice of products and services at most efficient prices/costs.

The goal is not full employment of-course, that's a side note, it's a side issue. The goal is to provide everything that the market wants at the prices that the market prefers.

So going back to the economic disaster that USA and the rest of the Western socialized societies are facing. The reason why the economies are in such huge trouble is the mis-allocation of resources - human and capital resources, that is created by the government. The fix to it is more free market, not less free market and more government.

If the free market provides one product/service at very low costs, that's not a failure of market, that's a success of the market, as it obviously created an environment in which this product is possible at that price.

Any spending that can be reduced on any product is a good thing. The increase in spending is a bad thing. The increase in debt ceiling was not the crisis that the politicians want you to believe it was. It would have been a self-imposed austerity measure, that would have started the US economy on the road to recovery.

The actual CRISIS is the DEBT.

Because of that any reduction in spending needs to be understood to be a good thing, this applies to Free/free software as much as it applies to any other spending.

Re:Why?

[MozeeToby]

Isn't that just the broken window fallacy? I mean sure, nothing is destroyed but the effect is the same: spending money on software (or a new window) when you could use free alternatives (or keep your current window). Free software is cost efficient software, and efficiency is better for the economy than unnecessary spending.

Re:Why?

[JesseMcDonald]

Exactly. The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors, as taxes are imposed whenever money changes hands regardless of whether the exchange is productive. Everyone else benefits most from saving their money until they can make a productive trade, not from compulsively spending it as quickly as possible.

Re:Why?

[UnknowingFool]

Please we all know the programmers at Apple will spend their money on black turtlenecks.

Re:Why?

[jank1887]

similarly, along with the inability to save money goes the almost incessant need to spend borrowed money. not having to buy a $100 Windows license just means most people are creating $100 less consumer debt. Now, some level of consumer debt can be argued as healthy to a stable economy. The current economic constriction is as much from people reigning in debt-spending as being fearful. Economic activity shouldn't get back to where it was before. It was fueled by a phantom home-equity driven debt-spending binge. You don't fix a heroin addict's withdrawal symptoms by putting him on crack. You wait out the rough period and stabilize with reasonable activities.

Re:Why?

[networkBoy]

I would argue, that as opposed to going into a bank account, money saved by most consumers is going into debt payoff. I know in my family (and several of my friends/kids' school families) this is the case. Skimped expenses are being used to build some infrastructure (home repairs, improvements, a garden, etc.) and the rest is being sent in to creditors.
I am very rusty on my econ 101, but IIRC (likely not) debt paydown is not considered savings (though has a similar result on the overall balance sheet).

Re:Why?

[UnknowingFool]

Salary wise that includes Steve Jobs who still makes $1 a year. Capital gains wise he makes much more in stock but only if he sells it.

Re:Why?

[networkBoy]

Why another bank?
Why not hold up a bank and tell the teller: now zero my debt balance and no one gets hurt.
(obviously a stupid criminal, but largely those that walk in to hold up a bank fit that description).

Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB

Re:Why?

[MarkvW]

The more money moves, the more people work. The more people work, the more people eat.

Conversely,
The more people work, the more money moves. The more money moves, the more people eat.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving money around as a way to grow the economy is overrated. The best way to grow is to actually produce something useful.

If no one is willing to buy this ever-so-useful thing that you just produced, the economy will not grow. You can have millions of robots in thousands of factories working 'round the clock building stuff and not grow an economy. You could put a 3D printer in everyone's home and not grow an economy.

The only way for an economy to grow is for people to have assurity their future is secure and thus become willing to spend the wealth they have, with faith and trust that they will continue to have the ability to obtain additional wealth later.

Re:Why?

[wintercolby]

The broken window fallacy would suggest that money not spent on anything that is cheap or free would be spent on something more useful or otherwise needed.

Re:Why?

[ClickOnThis]

Wasn't there a guy just recently that "robbed" a bank of $20 and waited for the cops or something?
-nB

I think you mean this guy. He robbed the bank for $1 and surrendered, in order to get free health care in prison.

Jokes aside, the idea that robbing banks can help the economy sounds suspiciously like the broken window fallacy.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

money saved by most consumers is going into debt payoff.

so, in other words, it's going into a bank's own accounts rather than accounts said consumers may have with banks? Either way, that money isn't moving.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Yeah, he did that because he was out of a home and needed a roof, healthcare, et cetera. He saw it as a far more sure-fire way of getting said amenities rather than taking the risk of being unemployed for too long, which loops back to my point.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't magically start to move, either. Money in motion is the key to a healthy economy.

Re:Why?

[LordLimecat]

Open Source actually stimulates economic activity inherently - it makes people more productive.

Er, non sequitur. Just because someone isnt using OpenOffice (or libre), doesnt mean theyre not using a word processor. Just because youre not using Audacity, doesnt mean youre not doing sound editing.

Your statement would only be true if it could be shown that all Open Source software is inherently better at the task it sets out to do than proprietary; and we can look at the state of graphics drivers on linux (noveau vs nVidia blobs) and see an immediate, disproving counter-example.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

such as paying off a debt, which in-turn is hoarded by the bank that's scared to lend to anyone new.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

The goal is not to move money. The goals is to create wealth. Wealth is products and services. If the same product or service can be received with less movement of money and even without any money movement, then the market has provided the product very efficiently and anybody can have it.

Think about it this way: if there was free bread given out to everybody, would you be complaining that people need to make money so that they can eat and that's why bread should not be free?

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

A $50 image editor is NOT necessary.

If you are a professional, then a $500 image editor is necessary. However, that's another matter.

Re:Why?

[somersault]

It sounds more like you're talking about all software, than specifically open source. In many cases, the commercial closed source equivalent is more efficient, or even the only choice. I love free software, but I don't think it's somehow the solution to all of life's problems.

Re:Why?

[Attila Dimedici]

I am sorry but I believe that this is a flawed economic theory. The only way that saving money is bad for the economy is if that money is saved by stuffing it in the mattress. If the money is placed in the bank, the bank has more money to lend to businesses meaning that businesses can more readily finance changes necessary to meet opportunities. Actually, the problem with our current economy is that we do not have sufficient amounts of captial in reserve to supply funds to those who wish to take advantage of new business opportunities.
Of course, the economy is, also, slowed by the many new government regulations that are being introduced. It is not just a matter of there being too many government regulations it is the fact that new ones are being introduced at an ever more rapid pace.

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

All of those programmers working at MS and Apple are much like the guys at Initech.

They don't really get a cut.

Re:Why?

[Nursie]

Bad for the economy != bad for th individual
Good for the economy != good gor the individual

Nobody out there in the business world is tryin to boost the economy, they're acting in their own best interests. If FOSS appeals on cost and functionality then companies will go for it. if they don't see the value they won't. "The Economy" is the result of individual and corporate actions, not the driver.

Re:Why?

[ThosLives]

I dont know of anyone that is squirreling away money. Savings accounts are losing money as they pay an interest rate that is less than inflation rate.

Apparently the aggregate US population doesn't agree with you: people are increasing their savings to a degree not seen in quite a while. In fact, just a few years ago the net savings rate in the US was negative.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wall Street makes money. Money is very useful.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Spending for spending sake does not improve the economy. This is what Keynesians say all the time and they are wrong.

Re:Why?

[HermMunster]

Only pundits from the media ever claimed there would be a year of Linux on the desktop. Failure to acknowledge that is not beneficial to the free software community. Some germ of a media rep makes a claim and people forever mock Linux for not achieving it? It's ridiculous on so many levels.

As for the accomplishments of Linux just look to Android. That is Linux. There are 500,000+ new activations of Android every day. The desktop OS itself has significantly improved since those pundits bleeped those words to the general public. The progress Linux has made in all arenas is incredible.

The snag for Linux is still those lock-in technologies that Microsoft built into Windows. I've successfully helped many people switch after they learned that most if not all the things they do day in and day out can be accomplished with Linux (if you aren't set on gaming or MS Office, which the vast majority of people aren't--they just didn't know any better).

Re:Why?

[toadlife]

The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors

And the financial services sector.

Re:Why?

[countertrolling]

Burn their houses down.

Close... Kinda like that 'cash for clunkers' bullshit

Re:Why?

[noobermin]

That line was meant to be sarcastic :/ I hope you are merely concurring ^_^

Re:Why?

[JMJimmy]

Any intelligent company will know that soft costs are the real killer. It'll take a lot more in retraining/productivity loss working with a new program than simply shelling out the relatively small amount to buy a licence. If anything these times increase piracy and should the company survive (since it's obviously worried about $500, it may not survive) then they'll purchase a legit licence when they can afford it.

Re:Why?

[Arlet]

If you actually produce something useful, people will want it.

The only way for an economy to grow is for people to have assurity their future is secure and thus become willing to spend the wealth they have

In the first place, you must grow the wealth. Distribution is the easy problem.

Re:Why?

[nabsltd]

I would argue, that as opposed to going into a bank account, money saved by most consumers is going into debt payoff.

Maybe, but only for unsecured debt. For secured debt (mortgage, car loan, etc.), it's more effective to refinance the debt. You still have the raw debt, but you'll pay a lot less interest over the long term, so your total debt will be lowered. And, it will be lowered much more than increasing payments by 10-20% would do. If you are "underwater" on a secured debt, then perhaps paying it down would be better, but my guess is that you're better off with lower interest and keeping the secured item for long enough to get out from under it.

Then, you can hopefully take any extra money and put it into something that earns some interest.

Re:Why?

[MarkvW]

It is all about the "goal." If your goal is to create wealth for you, then that is your goal. If my goal is to equitably provide food, clothing, shelter, and health care to the Earth's people, then that is my goal.

If you want to impose your goals upon other people, fine. Earth has a rich history of people trying to do that.

In the future, we are going to have computers producing virtually limitless piles of "products and services." Do you honestly think that is going to make us any more "wealthy." Some greedy pig is always going to want more.

Re:Why?

[Dog-Cow]

You are an idiot. Complete, total, and probably uncorrectable.

If someone saves a $100 on one item, they have a few choices. Either they purchase some other item, they save the money or they pay off debt. If they purchase something else, the money has moved. If they save it, they have still benefited by whatever method they saved the $100. If they pay off debt, they are now free to spend the next $100 that comes in, because they owe less, or maybe nothing at all. That the receiver of that debt payment may choose to sit on it is irrelevant. It's no different, economically, than if the $100 had simply been saved.

In short, your suggestion that paying off debt is bad, economically, is completely wrong.

Re:Why?

[Archangel Michael]

Indeed. Yet this is the very thing we tax, removing incentive to become more efficient at production.

We should tax the things that as a society we cannot (should not) legislate away. Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana, Prostitution etc. and so on. ALL regulations and taxes should govern what we DON'T want, and not what we do want.

If we managed to do this, then we'd have all the income our government needs.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

Products are services are wealth, not money. As to 'greedy pig wanting more' - those are people who start businesses and create products and services, well, outside of Free software, if they are looking for profit.

Search for profit is by far the biggest motivator that increased the wealth of people on this planet most when compare to any other motivator, and 'greedy pigs' are the people who are looking for profit.

Re:Why?

[hedwards]

I've had that argument with more than a few folks over the years. They just can't imagine that service jobs contribute basically nothing to the growth of the economy. And even when they do it's only insomuch as they allow other workers to create more goods by freeing up time that they would have to spend performing those duties themselves.

Re:Why?

[hedwards]

The amount of money that goes there is only a fraction of what ends up going to rich investors.

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

Paying off a debt is best done when the economy is upward-trending and currently prosperous, not when the economy is depressed. Any money that goes towards paying off debt during a depressed economy is money which isn't being used to get the economy moving again, which prolongs the recession until consumer confidence either gradually returns as people establish a new (lowered) baseline of confidence or until debts are paid. The latter never happens at grand scales, and the former is accelerated as incentives are provided for consumers to spend money.

Also, the ad-hominem attacks are unnecessary, but since you already committed the comment to Slashdot, there's not much that can be done.

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

You mean like the next version of msoffice that requires retraining the entire company?

Re:Why?

[gcnaddict]

This happens to be the perfect demonstration of my point. As beneficial as savings accounts are individually, building them up en masse during a recession only stunts economic recovery. The goal is to build them up during economically prosperous times (which, incidentally, results on a higher ROI as interest payouts tend to be more favorable with better economic health).

Re:Why?

[MarkvW]

If you want people to work effectively, you must give them work that gratifies them. That gratification is not found merely in "products and services" for many people.

My "greedy pigs" argument was meant to illustrate that the accumulation of wealth is only socially valuable to a certain point.

Re:Why?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

So then to you high frequency traders must be the best thing for the economy then since they move massive amount of money around all the time really really fast.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

It's not about what I want, it shouldn't be about what a collective wants, it's about what every individual decides for himself, and this makes the market.

As far as we have observed, every individual wants more products and services at lower cost, thus this is what market optimizes itself for - creation of more products and services at lower costs. Government interference brakes this and causes inefficiencies, which bring the costs up and reduce choices, while creating monopolies and concentrating wealth inefficiently in monopolies.

As to "accumulation of wealth being socially valuable to a certain point" - I don't know what this means at all.

AFAIC desire to accumulate wealth is the only real mover of the market, this is what every individual wants - more wealth, or more products and services at lower costs. Thus those who figure out how to satisfy the demand of the individuals in the market best, get more affluent by creating this wealth and acquiring more savings of their own, which they then reinvest to make even more money, which is what I suppose you find repulsive for some unfathomable reason. I personally find it extremely reassuring, that regardless of what moral activists may wish or desire, the human ingenuity will not stop just because they personally are repulsed by its action.

Re:Why?

[Archangel Michael]

It is hard to save $100 because our tax code punishes people who save money, and make investments. Do exceptionally well, and government takes 50% of what you earn, and people don't think that is punitive.

We could solve all sorts of problems if we taxed bad behavior and not desired behavior.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are still losing money by have money is a simple savings account. If you'd put in 100 at the start of this year and get 2% over the whole year (if your are lucky), you'll have 102 at the end. But if the inflation is higher then 2% (apparently 4% over here). You'll be able to buy less with the 102 next year than you could have with the 100 at the beginning of this year. But you are still better off than being in debt.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to produce something useful is to move money around.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

I'd argue that people do not save money because there is no point in saving something that is constantly being debased and inflated and devalued.

Definition of money is store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange. They removed one important aspect of it: store of value with fiat that is backed by nothing, thus people do not save.

I know I don't save fiat, I spend it immediately and to store value I buy metals and mining stocks, which from my POV counts as savings (for metals) and investment (for stocks).

People do have savings when money is not being destroyed by the government. Savings are what makes credit possible.

Credit is not supposed to come out of thin air and printing presses. Eventually somebody must produce something and have the value of that production stored and not spent, which then makes this value transferable and available as credit for for investment.

So from my POV, having a product that is of low cost or even, as in case with free/Free software can be had without cost of any license is a good thing, as it allows building up more savings, which can be used for investment, which is the only legitimate way to improve the economy.

Re:Why?

[jbeaupre]

You're right, it has the same effect on the balance sheet. So it all gets counted as "savings." Pay down debt or put it in the bank, and the net is how much you've saved (positive of negative).

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Increasing the velocity of money increases prices, not output. Economics fail.

FOSS is great because it means you get the same (at least; normally better) software for less money, thus freeing up money for other things. You get the same bang for no bucks. How that's supposed to be bad for the economy is beyond me, I'm afraid.

Re:Why?

[HeckRuler]

Imagine you have a small nation with carpenters. They build stuff out of trees. Trees become a scarce resource and up pops a thriving tree farming industry. You know, planting and protecting trees.

Then, magic of magic, someone finds a convenient mountain pass. Right next door. On the other side of a small mountain is a literal forest of trees. Anyone can now get lumber. All they have to do is go get it. The tree planting industry tanks, and a few druids are out of business.

And yet the carpenters have plenty of material to work with, people have cheaper houses, cheaper goods, and a new (if smaller) industry of trail guides.

You are arguing to close the mountain pass, entrench the middle-men, and force everyone to support a worthless industry.

In short, your metrics are lieing to you. You can't trust them to show you the whole picture. "Money velocity" is just a simplification of an aspect of a very complex system that you don't have a good grasp of. Work on that.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Velocity of money != technological improvement.

Example: High Frequency Trading; a predatory activity and produces Zero net benefit for society. It is also not unique technologically speaking; it's basically a legalized hack of nasdaq that makes billions a year for certain people.

What you have today is more valuable then the money you have in your wallet; get that through your thick corpolitical skull because we ALL know what the NEXT arguement is. "Lets improve the velocity of money through X Scam which ultimately results in me owning way too much for my own, or anyone elses, health".

What would Ceasar have given for a night in one of todays dance clubs, or Napoleon to play with an AK? What would Hitler have given for internet access? What would you give up not to live as the richest man in the world, in 1000BC? "I'd get any gal I want!" No makeup, no de-oderant, and they'd be downright stupid.

Would someone 100 years from now be the richest man in the world? "Well no, none of the girls are genetically engineered plus there are venereal diseases too plus if they are difficult I can just go into the lovemaster5000 sim......"

1995: CD burners come out, Everyone makes CD burning software and sells it.
2000: 10 million cd burning softwares exist.
2005: IMGburn selects the simplest features from what's in the market and adds it's own to the pool. It's released.
2006: Companies stop wasting money on building the next biggest, bestest CD burning software or reskinning what they have to make it "pretty".
2010: The companies that do it well build full-featured solutions and integrate with mutli-burning disk companies or they relocate to russia to produce software reproduces disks so well they make pirates blush.
Today: Some young, enterprising programmer says "I hate this mediacd crud I wanna build an awesome burner!" And you know what his friend says? "Just get IMGBurn".
Tomorrow: Someone builds a 802.11 flash drive 64GB NAS appliance size and sells it for $25.
Later tomorrow: 10 billion softwares for loading that stuff up on a corporate network start because programmers think it's cool.

FOSS kills old software markets and forces companies to produce new innovative systems. It forces prices to reasonable levels.

FOSS isn't the most awesome software ever; it's just good enough that people use it and force the market to make better.

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

...except that what most people blow their money on devalues even faster than money does.

It's one thing to buy land or gold. However, most people are just buying bling and making no consideration for the future when they might need a pile of cash.

Such piles may devalue but they are still handy (like for buying the aforementioned commodities).

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

Actually that's questionable. I would say that whatever people buy that is not fiat cash may actually not only hold value, but increase in value over time.

I know that every piece of clothing that I bought over the last year has increased in value, though I am using the clothing, it still is more expensive now than it was a year ago to buy it. A cotton shirt is worth more than the money I spent on it a year ago. Since I normally buy a bunch, I might have worn any one of the shirts maybe 10 times over that year, so it's not too bad in terms of wear.

Of-course moving value out of fiat and into this was always a good idea over the past decade and it's even a better idea today. That's how you keep the value and have savings. Then you can use it to invest.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

In my last comment I am not sure how, but the link in the last sentence got eaten by the angry gods of the intrawebs.

Let's try again:

Of-course moving value out of fiat and into this was always a good idea over the past decade and it's even a better idea today. That's how you keep the value and have savings. Then you can use it to invest.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in a recession. People who lost 401k savings will salvage anything they can by limiting other expenditures. Therefore, money saved on an image editor will in fact go straight to a bank during a recession.

This is exactly why the economy is down right now. People are scared to spend unless it's necessary.

I only speak for myself with this, but I know if the free version of the software wasn't available, I probably wouldn't have the software at all, so this does nothing to help or hurt the economy, in my case.

Re:Why?

[JMJimmy]

Exactly, a lot of companies will put off upgrading to a new version during down times or skip over a version unless absolutely necessary.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

From an economic perspective, paying down debt and saving money have the same effect. They, as you said, have the same impact on the balance sheet and also increase the amount of money available for lending. When the savings rate is calculated, debt pay down is included in that figure.

Re:Why?

[couchslug]

"ALL regulations and taxes should govern what we DON'T want, and not what we do want."

That kills the argument against booze, weed and hookers because a large portion of the public want those things and have so throughout our history.

"Whiskey Rebellion" ring a fucking bell?

Re:Why?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I don't know about anyone else, but I paid off my debts, and now I am splitting the money that used to be used just to keep even on debts to buy silver and savings.
The best part... I have so much money now! No interest payments. No late fees, because they "forgot" to send my my bill.
Credit cards, and line of credit have zero ballances, I have savings for emergencies, and I am buying more "toys" than before. I just do it all with cash.
I do keep my credit cards active, buying gas witrh them, but they are always paid off on payday.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. "Debt is slavery."

Re:Why?

[mpeskett]

Doubt you'd be able to sell those shirts for more than you paid for them though, so if you were attempting to use cotton shirts as your store of value you'd do badly when it came time to trade for something else.

So that'd be thrifty spending (still worthwhile), rather than an investment. For storing value, better off with those other commodities you mentioned, the ones that aren't devalued by virtue of being second hand.

Re:Why?

[DriedClexler]

Ho...ly...shit. You just unwittingly summed up everything that is wrong with economic thinking these days: that it's detached from the premise that:

production = good
free stuff = good
greater efficiency = good

Yes, if people had to pay more to get software, more money would *sure* be circulating. And you could say the same thing about sunlight: if that evil economic terrorist known as the sun didn't bathe us in solar energy, we'd have to spend more money generating heat and light. WHOO HOO! Money velocity went up!!! That must be good, right! Because money velocity MUST be the secret to economic goodness!

Or better yet: ban home cooking. Make it so people have to pay for prepared food rather than preparing it themselves. HOORAY!!! MONEY VELOCITY WENT UP!!!

Spending is not inherently good. Rather, good spending is good. Spending that exists because of policies intended to prop up ancient economic measures is not good.

Get your fucking head out of the sand, and for once in your life try doing a reality check on your models' output.

Re:Why?

[TheRaven64]

The grandparent is correct. Breaking windows, in the traditional example, is bad because of the assumption that people would spend time and money on things other than window repair. During a recession, this is not necessarily the case. Breaking windows can, in theory at least, be a way of encouraging spending. If the people repairing the windows would otherwise be out of work, then this gives them money, which they then spend, which stimulates the rest of the economy, hopefully ending up in the pockets of people who need new windows, who can then employ the glaziers, at which point you stop breaking windows. There are historical examples of governments employing one team of people to dig ditches and another to fill them in for this exact reason - the recession is caused by lack of liquidity, which happens when people stop spending.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cost savings. Regardless of what your current balance sheet is, it makes sense to reduce your outgoings to ALARP. True whether you're raking in money hand over fist or whether you're struggling on the breadline. Perhaps this recession will make people realise that Free software can help their balance sheet however the company is doing.

On the other hand, you must factor in the motivations of different software producers. Free software producers do it to scratch an itch or for whatever their personal motivation is. This may not correspond with your motivation / need as a businessman. While most software will do most jobs, if you need something truly bespoke you may still need to pay for it (whether in house or by sponsoring FOSS projects).

Re:Why?

[DriedClexler]

And Bitcoin miners who loot all those transaction fees!!!

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

correction was made.

Re:Why?

[reasterling]

We can hand money back and forth all day long and not improve our livelihood. It is only when you give and receive goods of tangible value for the money that the economy grows. When a person accepts money for a good or service they should expect to be able to receive something of equal value when they spend that money. Anything less will see a reduction in the economy. When the government take money from someone who earned it and spends and give it to someone else to do busy work they are destroying true wealth. It is even worse with the actual broken window analogy. You are not just causing busy work, you are hindering the person who actually does the true generation of wealth. You destroyed his hard earned property and cost him time and labour that he had to spend to fix the window.

Re:Why?

[Archangel Michael]

By "don't want' I mean are socially regressive in some form or another (morally). We tried to ban alcohol, that didn't work out so well, and only produced gangs that supported the now illegal substance. We've made the same mistake over and over again with drugs and prostitution. The solution is not to make things like that illegal, but rather to tax them.

We have a great representative of this in cigarettes, where we've taxed them to a level that now is starting to create its own blackmarket. The tax revenue is diminishing on them. Which is why you don't see people wanting to raise the taxes any more, because the government already makes more on cigarettes than the tobacco companies.

Similar is Gasoline. Government makes more than Big Oil. IF we learned these lessons, why can't we apply them? Because all the prudes out there would rather deal with crime than make those who consume things pay taxes. I don't get it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The velocity of money is what made the latest crises so devastating. Slowing down the money economy and demonetizing certain niche sectors is a good coping strategy. It can help mitigate inequality and give people access to ressources they need but couldn't otherwise afford. Of course it won't make the crisis go away, because for that you would have to make capitalism go away.

Re:Why?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

As long as the market expects the devaluation of the fiat currency, your interest rate will reflect this devaluation. So if the market is a perfect predictor, your bank account will stay constant with regard to gold (the market would have to predict gold extraction rate perfectly, too, of course). Of course, if the market is too optimistic, you will loose money, and too pessimistic you will gain.

Remember, it's all in our head: Gold only has value because people think it has, outside of a few industrial processes. It works because enough people have faith that this state of affair will continue. Exactly like fiat currencies like the dollar: As long as enough people wants dollars to keep the worth up, it will continue to work. The difference is that the American government (or whoever makes those decisions on that side of the pond) decides to devaluate the dollar 10-fold, that faith will take a severe hit, and the market expectation would cause the interest rate for loan in dollars to go up significantly for a time, until the market is convinced that it won't happen again. Of course, that can't happen with gold, but then you don't get interest either.

Stocks, foodstuff, oil... these things a bit different.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

I am not saying gold is an investment, I hope I am being clear about it, it's a store of value.

As to inflation, I calculate it to be between 10 and 13 percent.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

A. dont give them any ideas. B. ill be laughing for a while thanx!

Re:Why?

[AvitarX]

Better than breaking windows is useful work.

In the great depression we built awesome parks for example.

This is better than breakking windows. In the downturn, taxes on business (breaking the windows) to employ software developers to devlope a public good (FOSS), and then when recover there is more money to hire them for real work (as software becomes cheaper).

Re:Why?

[arose]

I know that every piece of clothing that I bought over the last year has increased in value, though I am using the clothing, it still is more expensive now than it was a year ago to buy it.

The fact that money has lost value doesn't mean that you clothes are more valuable just because it would take more of the now less valuable money to replace them.

Re:Why?

[Hognoxious]

If the people repairing the windows would otherwise be out of work, then this gives them money, which they then spend, which stimulates the rest of the economy

In that case you might as well give the money direct to the people the glaziers would have given it to.

Same stimulus effect, less broken glass.

There are historical examples of governments employing one team of people to dig ditches and another to fill them in

That's retarded. You might as well pay them to sit on their butts all day. In fact, it'd be better - no wear and tear on the shovels.

Instead of doing equal and opposite actions with no net effect, it makes sense to employ people on useful public works. Dig twice as many ditches in places where they're needed, and then don't fill them in.

I don't think you totally grok the broken window fallacy. Don't think about money, think about things.

Re:Why?

[Patch86]

All any economic activity is is exchanging money for things we need.

If I buy a car, it's because I need a car. I hand lots of money over, and lots of people are paid to make the car happen- mine the materials, process the materials, design the car, assemble the materials, test the product, transport it to me, etc. The long and short of it is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.

If I need a medical procedure (that is to say, a service), I hand money over (I'm British, so actually the government does, but whatever), and lots of people are paid to make the medical procedure happen- the hospital is built, the doctors are trained, the science is researched, the nurses are hired, the ambulance is manned, etc. The long and short is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.

The former involves metal and plastic, and the thing I end up with persists for years after purchase, while the latter involves more intangible activities. But economically they're exactly the same- money has changed hands in exchange for something I needed/wanted, and people were kept busy to make it happen. The former doesn't have more economic merit just because it involved metal and plastic.

Re:Why?

[TheRaven64]

We can hand money back and forth all day long and not improve our livelihood. It is only when you give and receive goods of tangible value for the money that the economy grows

That's true, but it's only part of the problem. To give a historical example, one of the problems that the Confederate States in the USA had was a lack of consumers. Slaves didn't have any money and their owners buy them only the minimum required. This meant that production outstripped consumption (the same problem that China has today), which meant that it started to become hard to find buyers for the things they did produce.

Most of the time, recessions are not caused by a lack of production. In fact, unemployment is basically an oversupply of labour - you have people willing to work but no one willing to employ them because there is no one able to buy the extra things they would produce.

The problem is not a lack of wealth, it's a lack of liquidity. You and I can both be producing things of value, but if they are not things that the other wants, then we need some intermediates to sell them to. If those intermediates don't have any money, then both of us will go out of business. If they do have money, then I can sell the thing I make to one and then buy the thing you make, and we both stay in business.

The point of this kind of make-work is to ensure that there is enough money circulating that we don't get into this gridlock situation, where we are all producing things of value but can't sell them because everyone else needs to sell the thing that they produce first. This is a very common failure mode for an economy.

The broken windows fallacy is a reductio ad absurdum argument. If everyone breaks windows, then you have lots of wealth being destroyed. In an economy in recession, destroying some wealth to increase liquidity can be worthwhile, because it makes the economy recover faster, which leads to more wealth creation in the long run.

Re:Why?

[lupis42]

Er, non sequitur. Just because someone isnt using OpenOffice (or libre), doesnt mean theyre not using a word processor. Just because youre not using Audacity, doesnt mean youre not doing sound editing.

Your statement would only be true if it could be shown that all Open Source software is inherently better at the task it sets out to do than proprietary; and we can look at the state of graphics drivers on linux (noveau vs nVidia blobs) and see an immediate, disproving counter-example.

If there were no opportunity costs, that would be correct. Because there are opportunity costs, Open Source only has to be better than whatever else was an option given the resources available. If I am an aspiring developer living on $ramen/week, I cannot afford to purchase high end %dev environment, %office software, %operating system, and %hardware, but I might be able to purchase %hardware and use open source for the rest, and thus still be productive.

Re:Why?

[lupis42]

Well, all software (that people use voluntarily) is used because it makes people more productive in some way - the thing that's significant about Open Source is that all it's costs are directly convertible to time, whereas proprietary software's costs are usually financial. If you can easily convert your time into money, than proprietary software is probably a good fit for you, but if converting your time into money is hard or inefficient, being able to trade a monetary cost for a temporal cost is a good deal.

Re:Why?

[Lumpy]

Problem is I am poor and did not have $85,000 in cash to buy my house so I got a loan at 4% paying anything extra to that 4% is a higher yield than anything else out there.

Us poor people that barely make $40,000 a year are forced into debt because real-estate is hyper inflated.

Re:Why?

[Cable]

Paradox of thrift.

Re:Why?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I don't count a mortgage as debt. I do have a mortgage, but what I pay on that is very close to what I would be paying for rent, so it is worthwhile debt. My mortgage allows me to make extra payments if I wish. You would be amazed what that does to your oweing balance. Early on it is like doubling your money.

Re:Why?

[Hognoxious]

you get the biggest return by paying down debt than saving anything at all right now.

Not necessarily. One, some kinds of debt have penalties for early repayment. Two, some kinds of debt are subject to tax relief.

Of course, if you don't have any income the second is unlikely to concern you.

Re:Why?

[Risen888]

I'd argue against that. By not spending money on software (which in my opinion is a cash sink; you may as well try to stimulate the economy by going to McDonald's), people have money to spend on, say, a new computer (or whatever), which is an actual tangible asset.

I am not an economist, and I welcome any rebuttals to this half-assed 7:00 AM idea.

no

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:no

[wjousts]

Agreed!

Re:no

[larry bagina]

If you don't have a job, if you're sitting around at home/basement in your underwear eating cheetos, your time is worthless. Unemployment now lasts 99 weeks -- almost 2 years. No doubt it will be extended again until an entire segment of the population will be on permanent dole.

Great for linux? Maybe. But the kind of people who would sit around collecting unemployment for years are the kind of people who use Internet Explorer, if you catch my drift. (For those of you who didn't catch my drift, you use Internet Explorer and have a low IQ).

Re:no

[arbulus]

The same argument could be made about for Windows administration costs. It costs you money, but then you still have to pay people to manage it. Linux solutions might cost no money, and you still have to have some one manage it. Either way, the people who manage it have to know what they're doing. But even then, there's just as much documentation around the web for managing Linux systems as there is for managing Windows systems.

The real key is whether or not a Linux/FLOSS solution is right for your organization.

I manage a number of clients who are medical facilities. Even with their "web-based" medical software, it still requires Windows/IE/ActiveX nonsense. The rest who have locally hosted databases require Windows (which sparks another rant on the lack of cross platform support in the medical field). These facilities are constantly trying to find ways to cut costs. I would love to move them to free software solutions top-to-bottom, but I can't. I have, however, been successful in converting several of them to OpenOffice/LibreOffice, which has saved thousands of dollars and the users are perfectly happy with that.

Re:no

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/Linux, BSD, etc., cost time, just as learning literally anything else in the world costs time. If that's your deterrent, you must have zero hobbies and/or skills.

Proprietary software costs time AND money. More importantly, it costs freedom and potentially safety, privacy, etc.

Re:no

[Lumpy]

You can successfully run IE6 and IE7 on Linux using wine. I have done this for ages... I have not tried running IE8 or IE9 though...

Re:no

[Culture20]

because linux is only free if your time is worthless.

And Windows is only $169 per license if your time is even more worthless. The constant reimaging, the futzing about with intentionally hidden design features, the 3rd party software that doesn't update automatically with OS updates (where the OSS replacement of said software is in the repos). Linux/Unix admins are only paid more because we have esoteric knowledge. Windows admins do a lot more work.

Re:no

[Dog-Cow]

No organization of any significant size allows users to update apps from the web. Whether the app is in a distro's repo or not is mostly irrelevant, as update mechanisms exist for Windows which give basically the same functionality.

And no admin with a clue is constantly reimaging or futzing with anything. But then, I've only worked in places with competent admins and image builders.

I think not...

[ThoughtMonster]

...given that the current economic situation is partially due to excessive corporate control of government and as such, the economy itself. Or is it the other way around?

free software is not free

[alen]

just look at android, the development costs for each new version cost HTC who ever is Google's favorite of the week a lot of money. the phones aren't any cheaper than the iphone a lot of times

free software is usually good a decade or so after the retail software has been on the market. something like jboss replacing weblogic

Re:free software is not free

[Jonner]

just look at android, the development costs for each new version cost HTC who ever is Google's favorite of the week a lot of money. the phones aren't any cheaper than the iphone a lot of times

free software is usually good a decade or so after the retail software has been on the market. something like jboss replacing weblogic

Quality Free Software may lag proprietary except when it comes first, such as web servers. As you point out, there's big money in Android, which only lagged iOS in popularity by a couple of years. The primary reason for Android's quick growth and success is that it's a commercial (as opposed to proprietary) project. If a company has resources and skill, they can develop quality software quickly, whether it's proprietary or Free.

Re:free software is not free

[HeckRuler]

free software is usually good a decade or so after the retail software has been on the market.

Yeah, like remote desktop, desktop search, and multiple desktops....

Re:free software is not free

[exomondo]

Exactly! TFA seems to not understand the concept of free software, it's free as in freedom not free as in cost. Someone still has to pay for maintenance, features, etc...

Short answer, "Yes with an If"

[Anonymous Coward]

Long answer, "No with a But"

Yes, and no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad economic times make FOSS tempting, but it makes commercial software providers start taking action to keep people from moving to FOSS. There is a reason that most pro cameras require Photoshop plugins (and not the GIMP) if someone wants to decode the RAW camera images.

Dont' forget the CAD ecosystem and sound files. You are not getting away from AutoCAD no how much you try, nor are you going to get away from ProTools and other DigiDesign offerings if you want to be considered a respectable studio putting out quality albums.

No Linux on the Desktop

[jmorris42]

Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC. And since there is zero chance of that changing the economy can fall off a cliff and Linux adoption on the desktop won't budge from the ~1% of people cluefull enough to install it themselves and annoyed enough with Windows infestations and other breakage to go to the bother of being an outcast.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC

Either you need to include Apple computers, in which case it's not everyone, or else your definition of PC is so narrow it wouldn't include a Linux PC anyway.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[elrous0]

Exactly. The cost of Windows or OS X is trivial for users because they basically come with the computer (depending on whether you go PC or Apple, of course). This could make a difference if it was a common occurrence for people to build their own computers (as many of us geeks do) or if computers-sans-OS's were routinely sold at a discount in stores. But the vast majority of people are saving nothing by installing Linux on their computers. In fact, it would actually cost them MORE in time to install it than to just leave the default Windows or OS X installation.

Now with apps, you MIGHT have a better case. There is little doubt that Blender is a shitload cheaper than 3ds Max to use if you're looking to do some 3D editing. And GIMP is much cheaper than Photoshop. But, chances are, if you're doing such high-end video or graphic editing, you're probably going to be willing to sink in the money to use an industry-standard program (unless it's a one-off deal where you don't ever have to worry about contract work or sharing). It may also be a lot cheaper to install OpenOffice on your startup's PC's than to buy a bunch of Office licenses. But again, if you're a serious startup, the cost of Office licenses are likely to be pretty trivial compared to the hassle of using non-standard software.

So no, in the end I very seriously doubt that even a more serious economic slide than we're already facing would really help FOSS much. At most, it might lower the cost of some of the more expensive proprietary stuff (as it already has on software like Final Cut Pro, for example).

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[Lumpy]

For the home market? yes.

For corporations? no.

That Sticker means nothing at all to a corporation. It's why we buy volume licenses. Because Microsoft EULA has provisions that large corporations really need to use the VL model. Most of the time corporations not only buy 2X the OS licenses they need, but many time 2X the client licenses as well.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[sourcerror]

I don't know how is it US, but computers in Central-Europe doesn't get bought in big box retail stores, but in specialised shops, where you can cherry pick your components for no additional fee. Still Linux isn't really widespread, as it has fewer mature applications, and schools/univerities also expect you to use Matlab/Autodesk/Adobe stuff, which are more hassle to install on Linux, if they run at all.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jedidiah]

That sticker actually means a great deal to corporations.

Corporations are the biggest misers around. That is primarily why Linux has thrived so much. Corporations love to cut costs wherever they can.

In truth, Corporations don't "buy extra". They are more likely to be short a few. That is why the SBA is such a big problem. There will likely be a shortfall somewhere even if the company involved is trying to be more or less diligent.

Extra licenses? Surely you must be joking.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jawtheshark]

Central Europe as defined by Wikipedia? You can then definitely exclude Germany and Switzerland because there you get your computer from something like Media Markt or Saturn or... Aldi. Which means you get an OEM computer. For Western Europe (France, Belgium, The Netherlands, etc...) you can bet on OEM too. The small pop 'n pop stores where you can pick your components are dwarfed by the sales in big box retail stores. I'd wager to bet that every larger supermarket sells OEM computers.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[sourcerror]

I meant Hungary, Slovakia. And I guess it's similar in Romania and Poland too.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jawtheshark]

That's what I guessed. Expect the mom 'n pops to die out in the future. It's what happened here. I remember that in 1994, I still went to a mom 'n pop store. Now I would be hard pressed to find one.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[sourcerror]

We have big box stores too (Media Markt, Saturn), but they have rather shitty customer service, who usually don't know shit about computers, just got a 1 day training, and people just don't trust them. Most of their revenue comes from digital cameras, camcorders, monitors, printers and TVs.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jawtheshark]

Yes, back in 1994 customer service was important as computers were expensive relative to income, which I suspect is still the case in the countries you mention. For us that's not the case anymore. Computers have become commodities like TVs, cameras, etc... People just buy a new one if the old one acts up. That explains the AMD64s and the occasional Core 2 Duo in the dumpsters at my local recycling centre. They are not defective, they just need a reinstall.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[sourcerror]

Well, in the place I live people don't just throw away their machine, as wages in Hungary are four times lower than in US/Western-Europe.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jawtheshark]

I find it stupid too, hence I take what I can get and repair it and hope to find someone who wants to have it.

Re:No Linux on the Desktop

[jawtheshark]

Now I had my coffee, I might shed some light on why the way of looking at computers changed. I'll use as a reference PC-Specialist, which is pretty close to what you'll get as a "mom 'n pop" store. First things first, from their website, I can gather that a virus-removal is 79€, hardware upgrade is free (provided you buy the hardware with them) Now, you have an old crusty P-IV that is virus infested and you'd like to have 2GB RAM instead of the 512MB it came with. Two 1GB DDR sticks will set you back around 44€ (Online shop in Germany, but prices won't differ that much). This means, you're looking at a 123€ bill to get an old machine running again and probably the person working at the shop will tell you it's not worth it. Thing is, he's most likely right. From the "Angebote" PDF at PC Specialist, you'll find on the first page a laptop for 379€ with a Core i3 and 3GB RAM that'll kick your old machine at any task conceivable. Want no laptop and reuse your old screen, keyboard and mouse? See page 4 for a 249€ desktop, Pentium E5700 , 2GB RAM or page 349€ for a Core i3 with 4GB RAM.

That means that for a mere 126€ more (took the page 4, 249€ desktop for the calculation), you get a significant upgrade that is trouble free from the start, with warranty. Sure, you pay more, but you definitely get more too and are going to be fine with the machine for at least a couple of years, which is not guaranteed with your old P-IV (the powersupply might blow two days after repairs and that will set you back again).

Look, I'm a dumpster diver. I take what people throw out and try to get it working again. Mixing and matching components to make out of two or three PC, one that is good. It's a hobby and when I give away a PC, I don't ask anything for them. However, considering the age of the machines, I couldn't even ask 100€ for them. It's hard enough to give them away for free and it takes a lot of time to get them running (depending on the find and the mix-and-match I can do) I only do it because it's a fun hobby, but it definitely has no economic sense.

It would be for sane actors

[Compaqt]

I mean, you're this close to going bankrupt.

You need to cut costs in every area.

-No more Aeron chairs.
-No more leather recliners in the break room.
-No more M$ software for the sake of it.

But if you've been brainwashed by Microsoft's dorky ads (remember the ones comparing an old version of Office to dinosaurs?), you'll never consider it.

If you're serious about cutting costs, you'll just move to Ubuntu^H^H^H Mint, and use OpenOffice. ("Get used to the icons, already!")

But if you're not, you won't because you don't want to be using a "dinosaur" (a version of Office without the ribbon).

Re:It would be for sane actors

[b0bby]

I mean, you're this close to going bankrupt.

But corporations are FAR from close to going bankrupt. The recession has had a much larger effect on workers.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[Mongoose Disciple]

You implicitly assume the cost of switching is zero. It's very much not in any business of moderate or greater size, even if you assume the time of your employees doesn't cost you anything (which it does). It's not even low.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[marcosdumay]

If you are close to bankrupt you, maybe, can switch to FreeOffice. What you can't do include the following:

1 - Switching desktops to Linux. That means extra costs and no actual economy at the short term. You aren't buying new licenses of Windows anyway, nor new machines. You are near bankrupt, remember?

2 - Swithcing to Apache (or to a free DBMS). That implies you'd switch all that old .asp (or sql) codebase. Yeah, it would bring some economies at the short term but also a big spending. No deal.

3 - Switching from MS network management solutions (AD, Exchange, Sharepoint). It would bring huge savings at the next upgrade, but that upgrade won't happen while you are near bankrupt anyway.

4 - Switch CAD (any kind). Yeah, new short term expenses and you don't plan to buy new licenses anyway.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand a lot of companies have a normal seasonal sales dip, you do not want to fire workers and rehire every year many (all the good ones) will not come back and wont be as motivated if they do, so their time is already paid for but also not filled. Alternatively many companies have licences which require 3 yearly renewal, or need updating right now (or rather last year and thy have been putting it off) your workers time is costly but the cost of the next 3 or even six years worth of software at once could bring you under, so the long term costs are immaterial, this as well as profits an added lock-in being why Microsoft likes site licences with yearly renewal.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[Penguinisto]

...then again, you usually have to pay those costs anyway (in money or time) every time a new edition of MS Office comes out. This is especially true with MS Office 2003 -> 2007, and is still true enough to count if you go from 2007 -> 2010.

The only real difference is that you pay them in smaller increments more frequently.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[sourcerror]

The 4th is the least likely to happen. I don't know any OSS CAD software that's on Autocad/Solidworks level.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[Mongoose Disciple]

I see you don't work in business.

The cost of a license for your workers is a rounding error. The cost of training people to use something that isn't Office isn't.

Re:It would be for sane actors

[Hognoxious]

But if you've been brainwashed by Microsoft's dorky ads (remember the ones comparing an old version of Office to dinosaurs?)

Fuck me, those sucked oh so very much. The masks looked like they were made by 12 year olds in art class and they didn't even try to photoshop out the joins around the neck. Utter wank.

Perhaps they thought they were being ironic. Our survey said "ughhhhh ughrrrrr".

Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[guacamole]

The cost of switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses. I had worked as a sysadmin before. No one pays sticker prices for Windows, not OEMs and not the enterprise users. The license cost is cheaper than you think. At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users. Next, a lot of enterprise users want an "enterprise" OS with associated support, and this stuff does not come free. (Take a look at support contracts for RedHat Enterprise Linux)

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Osgeld]

and what happens when that 1 mission critical software package will not run in linux, fail

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[DadLeopard]

This might be true for a Business, but or an average user, the savings is very large, well unless they just get a copy of all that software from their friend that works at XYZ company and brings his copy to use at home! For the average computer user, it is as easy as popping in a CD, hitting reset, answering a couple of questions and waiting a half-hour!

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[DrgnDancer]

From a licensing perspective RHEL is much cheaper than Windows. Not in the base cost, which is close to the same for Windows Server and RHEL, but Red Hat doesn't ask for seat licenses. That's where Microsoft gets you. If you setup an AD server you need a seat license for every single account (you can go with concurrent use licenses, but you risk someone not being able to get in if you have more users than licenses). That's no biggie with 10 users, but steadily increases, while the cost of RHEL stays the same. Most of Microsoft's server OS pieces use seat licenses. You get a deal if, say, you bundle your AD licenses with your Exchange licenses, but you're still paying by the user.

This is not to say that using Linux is cheaper than using Windows. There's tons of factors involved in figuring out TCO on one system vs. another. As a rule Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins. There's often user training costs involved in switching OSs for any but the most trivial use cases. If you're already a Windows shop (likely unless you're either in a few specific industries or a new company), there's going to be lots of one time costs in transition. Sometime software has to be rewritten, replaced with another version, or simply doesn't exist for other platforms.

Speaking very generally I think that some, perhaps many, companies could save money by switching to Linux or other free alternatives, but I don't see them doing it during a recession. Like I said, there's lots of one time costs involved in such a switch, and even if you think you can save money in the long run by switching, you're not going to want to absorb those one time costs in an already lean period.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses

Tell that to the BSA.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, an enterprise system should have someone who knows what they are doing in order to configure them correctly for the situation they are in.
Secondly, the cost to train someone to do enterprise work in a MS environment vs a Linux environment, is more, because they have to unlearn their mistakes they learned when dealing with non-enterprise systems.
Thirdly, are you seriously suggesting that a MS "enterprise" system costs less for support then a RedHat system. Please compare apples with apples.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like BS astroturf to me... enterprise Windows Server licenses are not cheap at all AND they're closed source.

Having "official" support isn't as important with Linux because you're aren't locked out of the codebase and bent over to begin with. It's a requirement for Windows.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux Desktop encompasses far more than just enterprise users. In the case of personal use Linux really is the vastly more cost-effective solution, especially for someone who lost his work laptop when he got laid off and now has to go find the cheapest laptop or desktop he can.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[LWATCDR]

Yes and then you have the Virus that is Visual Basic. There are so many programs written in VB that people depend on. If those don't run you are in deep trouble. Now if you look at the server side then yes you could see even more Linux and frankly MySQL and Postgres deployed.. I tired to get one person to move to Linux. I had an old box and I set it for the person at the Church Library to use. All they did was us it to look up videos from a list. I set up everything for them but they stopped using it. Why? It scared them because it looked different!
 

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[rubycodez]

At most of my employer's clients, usually its the Windows that fails, the mission critical app can't run on windows server but can run on four or more other OS. The client could be anything. I'm talking about DBMS, MRP, ERP, Insurance payment and adjudication, trading, banking. No windows required.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[rubycodez]

No place I worked at ever had Windows training. Techs might occasionally come by and show the user how to do something. It takes much longer to install windows than Linux in a corporate environment, by a factor of four in places I've worked (yes, those were automated install-reboot-installMore-reboot-etc). The downtime from the malware is huge with windows, and downtime by Exchange server fuckups and limitations. Windows could be more expensive by the time wasted.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[jeremiahstanley]

I've never worked anywhere that actually "trained" users on anything but custom in house software. This means that no matter what it runs on they will need that training. Nobody gets "trained" to use office suites or email. Maybe you have one of those good jobs where they don't just show you the door when they decide to switch platforms and hire another hungry monkey; no employer of mine has offered anything to "retrain" myself other than just keeping my job.

Conversely, if you are the type of company that needs software assurance you will pay for it. However, if you are the type of shop that doesn't have insurance contracts you probably also won't have large shop pricing on Windows or anything else. This means that FOSS will save you quite a bit, this is why it is used as "network glue".

Here you go sir, this is your troll chow...

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[TheLink]

In contrast with Windows, for the average computer user it is as easy as buying a PC that already comes with Windows preinstalled.

It can even be cheaper than Linux in upfront costs, since someone is paying the PC maker to let them put their crapware on it...

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[hedwards]

Not really, you just do it the next time MS releases a new office suite. If you're going to have to pay for training and licenses anyways, you may as well not pay for the licenses and just pay for the training that you'd already had to pay for.

Competent FOSS projects don't reinvent the UI to a significant degree for the hell of it, more often it's just minor tweaks for things that weren't working well. Things which could be readily handled in a 15minute or shorter meeting.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Dog-Cow]

You've worked in places with crappy admins. The company where I work had one of the earliest AD installations (going back to early 2000s) and hasn't had a day of downtime. Never seen malware be a problem here, and once in a while an Exchange server goes down, but it's rare and will only affect a portion of users. We've had our DB (Oracle on Linux) server go down more often than Exchange. And the SAN product from IBM used to fall over once or twice a week.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[rubycodez]

How could it be crappy admins if the problem causing malware is "unknown" to prevention and detection methods, patches? Seems to me to be a case of poor code quality on the part of Microsoft; I don;t see other operating systems with this particular kind of problem.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[jimicus]

This is just it; people look at the retail price of a boxed copy of Windows and Office and think that's how much it costs.

I don't believe anybody pays that. I think that headline price is there purely as something to point at and say "Look how much you're saving!". 40-60% is not unusual, and that's for a small business licensing for maybe 40-50 people.

If we take a number out of thin air at £200 per person per year including CALs - that sounds like a lot of money but when you consider how much you pay each person each year it rapidly pales into insignificance.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an organisation with massive investment in MS products on the desktop, but which also uses some free software (but supported, say for instance something like RHEL with certain custom unreleased products) for mission critical apps. There would be a massive cost involved in contracting for all our desktops to be migrated to something (IMHO) better than MS on the desktop, and there would be additional costs in terms of interoperability with our business partners. The advantages of the solution we have for mission critical apps (security, OS stability.... Security is very important to us....) outweigh any disadvantages (negligible, since the apps were specified at design stage and we control who interacts with our apps and can dictate how they specify their environment). On the other hand, we pay our pieces of silver to keep our desktop MS environments safe.

I would absolutely agree there are circumstances where switching makes no sense - but also when you have the chance to do something right, setting yourself up in the wrong environment just because it's the prevailing once can make just as little sense.

Re:Switching to a free Linux is not cheap

[Bert64]

Linux admins are not so much cheaper, as the general standard of windows admins is lower...
For equivalent levels of competence the price is about the same (and such people are generally able to use the other system to some level too), "cheaper" only comes around because there are lots of people with virtually no knowledge whatsoever calling themselves windows admins.

The Year of teh Linux Desktop is nigh!

[webtron]

Seriously Slashdot, like I even need to say this. Most everyone I know uses either Ubuntu or Debian and a few others use Redhat and the like. The rest of the people I know use a Mac. So guess what? We're already there, Debian "just worked" on my netbook. All devices. I don't even have to say "Blah blah Andrioid" because Linux is everywhere. Sometimes I hear about people, usually through the Internet, who use Hotmail and complain about computer viruses all the time. These people shovel money at anything and have no idea what is going on. To these people the concept of TCO does not exist.

Re:The Year of teh Linux Desktop is nigh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you know a very strange group of people, windows market share is well over 90% even now.

I doubt it!

[DadLeopard]

There are too many people that haven't a clue as to how much time and money they are wasting on Microsoft products and all the other software that you need to make that work! Of course they aren't actually paying for most of it! How many people do you know personally that have actually paid for the versions of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office they are using, though they do have to pony up for their commercial Anti-virus programs to get the updates, well that is if they aren't smart enough to use something like AVG or Avast. Their computer came with Windows and that is what they will use till they buy the next one, which will also come with Windows, though some with a lot more money and a little more brains will buy from Apple and get on that treadmill instead! It's only the totally P.O.ed, fed up and just a bit smarter or desperate that will even think to try Linux, though once they do they will never go back! Once a slave throws off his shackles he will fight like hell to keep them off!

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

ok what? most people are going to buy a pc, and whats on there? pretty much everything you need, cd burner applications, movie editors, media center hell most even come with a home version of MS office, anti virus? you know MS has been giving one away for a couple years now and its actually better than most commercial ones right?

linux users are the shacked ones, dependent on whims of egomaniacs, and in a constant state of broken, your constantly having to fight with it, which is fine if that is your thing but I usually turn on a computer to get something done, not fuck off all my time.

(posted from mint, which magically woke up and will not work at 1280x1024 anymore, though it has been for almost a year now)

Re:I doubt it!

[Lumpy]

Never used linux have you...

"pretty much everything you need, cd burner applications, movie editors, media center hell most even come with a home version of MS office, anti virus? you know MS has been giving one away for a couple years now and its actually better than most commercial ones right?"

You just covered what Ubuntu comes with out of the box. Except for the AntiVirus... Linux does not need one.

Oh and Linux comes with an entire software library that is single click install. Thousands of applications like Games, genealogy, programming, graphic design, 3d design, etc... Zero effort to install, just click, enter your password, and it's installed and ready to go. There is even an accounting system with a Point of Sale system available in the single click to install software list.

Windows is the one that is crippled. You obviously have not used a modern Operating system in several years to even think that Linux does not come with everything needed for the home user and many business users.

As for "constant state of broken" Did you last try linux in 1995? because all of your knowledge is so far out of date that it's laughable.

"posted from mint, which magically woke up and will not work at 1280x1024 anymore, though it has been for almost a year now" Ohh, you are using a unmaintained offshoot. Please use a STABLE release of a well maintained Linux release. Ubuntu 10.10 is highly stable and does not fail on stable hardware. You do know you dont have to upgrade when a upgrade is released....

Re:I doubt it!

[noobermin]

Sorry that you must have messed up your system and not known you had. You do need some knowledge of the system, at least some...I mean, if you go and delete System32 like the kids on 4chan tell you to you deserve no sympathy when things stop working next reboot...

Computers don't "magically" wake up with back pains. In Linux, it happens to be easier to find the cause of the pains.

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

"Never used linux have you..."
yes I use it daily

"You just covered what Ubuntu comes with out of the box. Except for the AntiVirus... Linux does not need one."

so what is the advantage to Joe to sit down retrain all his employees on new software that does the exact same thing that windows is doing just fine? And the single click install is a mixed blessing, for every decent app in there there are 1000 broken chunks of shit and 1000000000 options for each, unless you know exactly what your looking for its not much better than apptitude

"Windows is the one that is crippled. You obviously have not used a modern Operating system in several years to even think that Linux does not come with everything needed for the home user and many business users."

Obviously your being too much of a fanboi to actually fucking read, I never said that linux didnt, but where is the advantage to using a confusing and constantly changing system for email when a windows box does it fine

""posted from mint, which magically woke up and will not work at 1280x1024 anymore, though it has been for almost a year now" Ohh, you are using a unmaintained offshoot. Please use a STABLE release of a well maintained Linux release. Ubuntu 10.10 is highly stable and does not fail on stable hardware. You do know you dont have to upgrade when a upgrade is released...."

Good for fucking Ubuntu 10, I dont like the desktop, oh but you can change it well fuck that I want to use an OS not fucking engineer it, this is a fatal flaw for the linux desktop that YOU PEOPLE just dont get, not all of us want to spend our lives fucking with a stupid OS.

Also first you tell me I need to run a STABLE release, well fuckwit I am, then you tell me I dont need to upgrade when a new release comes out well fuckwit I didnt so what the hell is your point?

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

here is what happened, I plugged it into a 1024X768 lcd for a couple hours, then I plugged it back into my 1280x1024 screen, after fucking with it for nearly a solid day I have it running at 1152x864 (what the fuck is that?)

I did not know linux was such a fragile chunk of shit that plugging your machine into another monitor would pretty much fuck my system. and ya I edited xorg.conf it just pulls a backup out of its ass and resets it to whatever the hell it wants anyway

Re:I doubt it!

[sourcerror]

So what's the alternative for After Effects or Flash?
I've just played around with Synfig. It's finally getting usable, but it's not in the same ballpark. (Also, it focuses on slightly different things). And 2 years ago it was really bug ridden, just like Kdenlive.

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

> for every decent app in there there are 1000 broken chunks
> of shit and 1000000000 options for each, unless you know
> exactly what your looking ...sounds a lot like Windows really. Plus, if you aren't careful you can end up installing stuff that's difficult or impossible to rollback properly. Windows can be very "subtle" this way. That's what happens when no one cares about a proper package manager.

Lack of caring about finer details leads to the subtle cracks you tend to see in Windows.

Even the Apple app store doesn't eliminate the problem of actually knowing what to install. You still have to try things out and evaluate them for yourself or find yourself a suitable source for recommendations.

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

Flash? You mean the browser plugin?

If you are trying to imply that Flash is not supported on Linux then you're really out of touch.

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

Hard to say what to tell you since I recently had to do EXACTLY the same thing myself and had no trouble with the affair.

I didn't have to edit anything.

X tends to run at whatever your native panel resolution is assuming you don't monkey around with anything and there's no much to motivate that either these days.

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

so its an invalid point isnt it

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

well if I didn't edit anything I would still be stuck at 640x480 or 320x240

Re:I doubt it!

[sourcerror]

No, I mean the authoring tool.

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

Time do call bullsh*t on your nonsense.

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

nonsense what the fuck is your deal? what can I say I plugged it in the other room I brought it back after dusting it out and now linux and only linux starts up in 640x480 with an option to goto 320x240

I reinstalled drivers it then gave me 1024x768, I edited xorg.conf and it reverts back now with 1152x864 or whatever

SORRY ITS MY FUCKING FAULT THAT LINUX IS BROKEN TO THIS POINT
no kindly go fuck yourself since your only helbent on telling me how much I suck, worthless fanboi anyway cant fathom the thought that OMFG linux is not the right tool for every job, fucking garbage cant even detect a monitor correctly, windows 7 isnt having this problem

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

ignore Jedidiah he is in a tizzy cause people might have a valid reason for not using linux

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

Yeah. Ignore the person actually forcing people to be precise.

I leave it to actual Flash developers to comment on this further. I rather doubt any of you pinheads fit that description.

Re:I doubt it!

[jedidiah]

Past a certain point, some things don't pass the sniff test.

Making noises about resolutions that are 10 years out of date is that point.

Try making up more convincing lies next time. Google harder or something.

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

yes we will ignore the troll trying desperately to find any loose thread

Re:I doubt it!

[Osgeld]

so fine fucker, when can I expect you to deliver my new monitor since the one I have now is not up to the fucking standards of some linux troll

Re:I doubt it!

[Bert64]

Some 6 years ago i had a laptop with a 1024x768 internal screen which i carried round with me, and a 1280x1024 screen on my desk to which the laptop was connected whenever i was in the office... It ran linux, and worked perfectly.

Your problem actually sounds like the opposite of the traditional X11 configuration problem...

These days, the system tries to detect the capabilities of the monitor connected to it, whereas back in the days with linux you had to tell the system what capabilities your monitor had.
The problem is when things go wrong with the auto detection and people have forgotten how to manually override things...

Over 10 years ago, i had similar problems to yours but with windows, linux gave me no problems at all because it simply did what it was told and didn't try to be too smart.

More recently intact, i have a TV set that can do 1080p but doesn't seem to advertise the fact properly... Some devices work with it, some don't... I can't get OSX or Windows to talk 1080p to it, and neither will Linux by default but if i manually modify the X11 config it will... I have no idea how to make the necessary changes under OSX/Windows.

Here we go again...

[Phics]

I love Linux, however, there isn't going to be 'The Year of the Linux Desktop'. Maybe there will be a 'The Decade of Gradual Adoption of the Linux Desktop for Enthusiasts', or perhaps 'The Eventual Five Year Rise of One Linux Distribution to Market Dominance in the *NIX Desktop Sector', but I suspect that we'll see different hardware form-factors make the desktop as we know it more or less irrelevant long before Linux makes any startling leaps in mainstream acceptance.

Re:Here we go again...

[Lumpy]

Linux already won. It's on your phone, it's on your DVD player, it's on your TV. You have more linux computers in your home than you have windows computers.

Apple proves the proposition false ...

[perpenso]

In the midst of an economic crisis the more expensive Mac platform enjoys a sharp increase in market share. I'd say the proposition is false, price is not the primary driver of operating system selection.

Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[E-Rock]

Where is this sharp increase in Macintosh market share? The latest report (covered here earlier today) puts the Mac at 5.59% compared to 88.29% for Windows. I'd agree that Mac's expensive offerings are still selling well, and Apple is making a lot of money, but not that they're making great increases in market share on the desktop. The iPhone and iPad are their money makers.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[perpenso]

"New data from Gartner and IDC show that sales of Macs in the United States have crossed the 10 percent threshold -- which hasn't happened since 1991"

"As U.S. PC sales declined 4.2 percent (according to IDC) or 5.6 percent (according to Gartner), Mac sales shot up more than any other PC line. Apple's performance far exceed the industry average"

"The high Mac sales figures comes on the heels of a report from Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry showing that one-third of big businesses now offer employees the option of a Mac, and that most employees offered the choice select a Mac rather than a Windows PC."

http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/apple-mac-sales-back-above-10-percent-after-10-years-002

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[jedidiah]

You lost it with that last remark.

One third of big companies allowing Macs? What are you smoking? If you are going to make sh*t up, at least make it believable.

Make the story something that doesn't fly in the face of everyone's experiences.

The Microsoft entanglements (not even getting into the 3rd party stuff) alone would make that a dubious prospect.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[perpenso]

You lost it with that last remark. One third of big companies allowing Macs? What are you smoking? If you are going to make sh*t up, at least make it believable.

Did something about the infoworld link and their reference to Global Equities Research confuse you?

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[jedidiah]

There is nothing at all confusing about an obvious lie.

Now if you are willing to provide something that is actually verifiable, then that's another matter.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[perpenso]

There is nothing at all confusing about an obvious lie. Now if you are willing to provide something that is actually verifiable, then that's another matter.

I cited an industry publication (InfoWorld) that has been around for over 30 years. A publication that has covered PCs, Macs and "big iron"; DOS, OS/2, Windows, Linux and Unix; iOS and Android; ... They cited a wall street research firm (Global Equities Research) that does work for Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan.

I think the above debunks your "obvious lie" suggestion. Now if I had quoted some guy at a Mac fan blog then you would have had a point. What is your reference to debunk the idea that fortune 500 firms are currently offering some employees an option between Macs and PCs and that in such cases Macs are preferred? I admit I was surprised to read this but when I followed the various links it mentioned this was a side effect of 80% of fortune 500 currently supporting iPads to some degree. Seems plausible, especially given that Macs run Windows and Linux in virtual machines quite nicely - legacy apps are not the deal breaker they once were.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[gmhowell]

You lost it with that last remark. One third of big companies allowing Macs? What are you smoking? If you are going to make sh*t up, at least make it believable.

Did something about the infoworld link and their reference to Global Equities Research confuse you?

It was mildly pro-Apple. That always confounds jedidiah.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has better average reliability and quality so the TCO is lower. Myself and every single Mac owner I know have see this first hand.

The "extra" price (which isn't actually much if at all - I paid more for my IBM ThinkPad than my MBA or MB) is more than made up for by 1) ease of use, 2) reduced frivolous admin hassle, 3) longer replacement cash flow intervals, 4) longer repair cash flow intervals, etc.

If you just want the computer to get some other task of value done rather than having to hassle with nerd maintenance, it's a no brainer. And the numbers prove it - it's late adoption folks who are kicking the Mac numbers up. Folks who can't "rebuild the kernel" to fix something that should have worked out-of-the-box. Mac represents very good value.

Re:Apple proves the proposition false ...

[QuantumFlux]

That popularity may be due to Apple's higher (perceived) build quality. If you're going to sink money into a computer or any other large purchase, would you rather buy something you think will last a few years or something cheap, built with cheap parts, that will probably break quickly and cause other headaches?

I think if/when the economy gets REALLY bad, the balance will tilt toward the cheaper end, but for now, people want the most bang for their decreasingly available buck...

Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[goombah99]

Ah the year of the linux desktop...been hearing that for a while.

Free software is mainly useful when you are implementing large quatities of things (e.g. server farms or point of sale terminals or generic desktops for interchangable worker bees. Also it's fantastic for sharing things to other people whoo can't be bothered to buy, say Matlab, to run your stupid script. that's why it gets so much play in acadamia.

but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibility and variety Linux has. Google, apple and microsoft spend a lot making it easy to use and assuring compatibility (well not google yet). Linux by it's nature is untamed. it's a lynx not a kitten. Nothing wrong with being a lynx, but they are never going to be housebroken.

shooting to be a desktop environment for the masses is trying to be the wrong thing.

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[couchslug]

"but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibility and variety Linux has."

Not to mention the constant UI changes inflicted on newcomers. It used to be getting a GUI running in the first place was a barrier to entry. Now that Linux driver support is excellent and most distros are easier to install than Windows, the new barrier is frequent UI change.

No problem for geeks, but I don't even bother to interest non-geeks in Linux because unless you are a techy and willing to put in a few hundred hours getting proficient it's a waste of time.

People buy Windows because they are used to Windows and because it is the de-facto STANDARD (though Redmond can't resist fucking around with the UI a bit).

I detest Windows, but Linux UI designers don't give a fuck about noobs. They provide a useful free service, but that doesn't make it wrong to point out shortcomings.

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[sourcerror]

Can you say ribbon?
Windows/MS Office UI always changed with new versions. And don't get me started about RealPlayer.

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[Nursie]

I actually agee with you pretty well. Who's shooting to be the desktop environment for the masses? Ubuntu? Mint perhaps?

debian and fedora are trying to be pretty bad-ass lynxes (to borrow your terminology) and do it well.

I don't necessarily see that linux couldn't ever be a great OS for the ordinary folk, but it's certianly not the direction most contributors are pulling in. They're making it ever more awesome for the likes of me (software dev).

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[hedwards]

If you're smart enough to use something other than Ubuntu, the change in UI is less significant than the change is in Windows UI.

Just look at how much IE, MS Office and Windows have changed their UI over the last 10 years or so. The fact that they have to train folks to handle newer versions speaks volumes for the lack of consistency over the years. I mean ribbon WTF.

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[Bob the Super Hamste]

They're making it ever more awesome for the likes of me (software dev).

Couldn't agree more. Even though in my free time I don't program I still use Linux at home as the GIS work I do (Grass GIS, UDig and others) work better on Linux or other flavor of Unix than windows.

Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're smart enough to use something other than Ubuntu, the change in UI is less significant than the change is in Windows UI.

That's temporary. Other distributions will be forced to move to Gnome 3, or switch environments altogether, because the people that actually write the code aren't supporting the old versions. Linux enthusiasts really don't seem to get that the vast majority of the important infrastructure code is written by a rather small group of people.

Correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software increases wealth, and it is abundant so everyone benefits.

However, wealth (the non-abundant variety) always ultimately flows upward. It loops downward a lot, but the net effect over time is that more and more wealth gets concentrated among smaller and smaller groups of people. Such movement is not indefinitely sustainable, so all economies collapse eventually.

Re:Correct

[EsbenMoseHansen]

However, wealth (the non-abundant variety) always ultimately flows upward. It loops downward a lot, but the net effect over time is that more and more wealth gets concentrated among smaller and smaller groups of people. Such movement is not indefinitely sustainable, so all economies collapse eventually.

Time series over the gini income coefficient (higher number means the rich are richer, so to speak) do not indicate this. At least, eyeballing the graphs does not reveal any trends for me. I know, this is just the income.. it would be nice if someone would care to do the graphs for the gini coefficent of the wealth directly.

Flawed logic

[deains]

Very, very few places have computers on offer with no OS installed. Practically none have Linux-based PCs on sale (I know there are a few, but the number is pretty much negligible here). So Linux is not the cheap option. You don't save money buying the computer without Windows, because you simply can't get anything without Windows. And here in the UK at least, the Ubuntu PCs I saw didn't save you much money over the Windows alternative anyway.

So basically, Linux isn't going to save the customer any money. Therefore it will be no more and no less attractive in a recession than at any other time. Therefore this article is complete twaddle. Next.

Wont happen

[Osgeld]

The powers are going out of their way to reinvent the desktop and fucking it up every chance they get

Default

[Mindcontrolled]

Do we need to carry on that "risk of default"-bullshit? The US never were in any economical risk of default, given their top credit rating. Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history and is worse in countries working just fine right now. The only risk ever was from the obstruction tactics of the tea party - and even if they kept it up, it would not have lead to a default in the strict sense. It might still lead to a downgrading of credit rating, as they amply demonstrated that a significantly influential group of the US political system can't be expected to act as adults these days - which scares off potential sources of credit.

Re:Default

[Arlet]

Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history

Only for a brief period just after WW2, according to this graph:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/us_fed_debt_full.png

A world war seems like a good excuse, though. What's the excuse this time ?

Re:Default

[Mindcontrolled]

You might have noticed the odd war going on lately? Not like I endorse those, but they are happening. At the arse end of the world, with no trustworthy allies around the theater, and therefore logistics chains from hell. All that while spending an insane amount on defense apart from that wars - for whatever reason. The point still stands, though - the US will not crash from that debt as such. Not saying that it is good to have it, but the only risk of crashing came from political grandstanding of a couple of self-obsessed arseholes with the only goal being destruction.

Re:Default

[Arlet]

the US will not crash from that debt as such

It can crash if the debt isn't allow to grow anymore, which could happen if other countries stop buying it.

Re:Default

[Mindcontrolled]

True, but other countries haven't seen an issue buying it until the teabaggers threatened to fuck it up by massive obstruction tactics. There were no fundamental indicators that would have necessarily lead to a downrating before that theatre act.

Re:Default

[roman_mir]

Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings all maintained at least A ratings on AIG and Lehman Brothers up until mid-September of last year. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy Sept. 15; the federal government provided AIG with its first of four multibillion-dollar bailouts the next day.

US has defaulted on the promise to pay gold for US federal reserve notes in 1971, ever since that moment the economic and financial collapse of the economy of USA was just a matter of time, not an 'if', but a 'when'.

GDP is as meaningless as it is weak, since it was revised down this way:

GDP estimates for the first quarter of 2011 were revised downward to 0.4 percent growth, a sharp drop from the previous estimate of 1.9 percent. GDP for 2007 through 2010, previously thought to have grown by an average of less than 0.1 percent each year during that period, was also revised downward, to show an average decrease of 0.3 percent per year.

Besides, GDP in US is fake, the way it's measured is fake, it's based on a fake economy and one more thing about it: they didn't use the appropriate deflator, because they believe that the inflation is about 2%, but in reality inflation is at about 10% level, and closer to 13% the way I calculate it:

sugar Dec 2003: 20.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 36.97 cents/pound, price up by over 81%
Beef Dec 2003: 105.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 193.00 cents/pound, price up by over 83%
Barley Dec 2003: 100.77 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 208.70 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 107%
Rice Dec 2003: 197.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 500.57 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 154%
Cocoa Beans Dec 2003: 1,646.58 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 3,113.52 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 89%
Tea Dec 2003: 205.22 cents/KG, Apr 2011: 325.33 cents/KG, price up by over 58%
Rubber Dec 2003: 57.31cents/pound, Apr 2011: 265.49cents/pound, price up by over 363%
Corn Dec 2003: 111.98 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 318.45 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 184%
Bananas Dec 2003: 371.43 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 1,013.47 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 172%
Propane Dec 2003: 0.63 USD/Gallon, Apr 2011: 1.45 USD/Gallon, price up by over 130%
Wheat Dec 2003: 165.57 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 336.30 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 103%
Oranges Dec 2003: 583.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 881.00 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 51%
Salmon Dec 2003: 3.12 USD/Kg, Apr 2011: 7.86 USD/Kg, price up by over 151%
Chicken Dec 2003: 68.98 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 86.42 cents/pound, price up by over 25%

Re:Default

[Mindcontrolled]

A state, however, is not a corporation, so what applies to AIG does not necessarily apply to the US. I do agree that the economy is shit, but I don't see what the price increase in commodities has to do with that - that's not a function of government debt, not even a sign of universal inflation, but rather driven by the oil price at large. That's where the fun starts, because it ain't gonna get any cheaper. Production has stagnated for years and will go into terminal decline soon. Government debt is peanuts compared to the real problem.

Re:Default

[Patch86]

The only risk ever was from the obstruction tactics of the tea party - and even if they kept it up, it would not have lead to a default in the strict sense.

Yes, it would. In the "strict sense" a default is when a country (/company/etc.) doesn't make it's debt repayment obligations. If US politicians decided that they didn't want to pay their debts any more (which is basically what would have happened if Congress had dug their heels in any longer), the US would have defaulted.

It's just that "default" on its own doesn't mean anything. What matters is whether investors feel they'll have their loans paid back; even if the US had defaulted in the short term (i.e., hadn't come up with a debt ceiling deal for another week), most investors would probably have kept their cool (as you point out, the US economy is amply strong enough to repay its loans, so there's no economic reason for them to panic). However, if investors feel the disruptions were going to carry on in the long term, they'd probably start to get edgy about just how reliable the loan repayments were going to be.

In other words, the US' credit rating is fine as long as this was a one off. If Congress insist on making a habit of playing this game every 6-12 months for as long as both parties have a veto (not uncommon), investors are going to start moving to greener pastures.

Re:Default

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong on it being the worst in history. It is currently just over 100% bit in the mid-1940s it was over 120% which according to math is larger than it is now!

See the chart at [url]http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1900_2016&view=1&expand=&units=p&log=linear&fy=fy12&chart=H0-fed&bar=0&stack=1&size=l&title=&state=US&color=c&local=s[/url]

This is not our first Rodeo

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been other recessions in the last 15 years. Each one did not result in a commiserate increase in the share of Linux Desktops. In fact, Linux desktop deployments have been relatively flat. Obviously, economics is not the main driver behind Microsoft' market dominance.

Money doesn't just dissapear

[future assassin]

People not spending money on commercial software doesn't mean that money just up and dissapears from the economy. Those people use that money for daily life necessities like food, utilities and transorrtation so the money goes back into the system but is taken throuhg a different industry.

Desktops will be in decline the next 10 years

[Wild_dog!]

With all of the explosion of micro pc's (aka smartphones and tablets becoming prevalent) I don't see linux as gaining in the desktop arena much. But handhelds based upon linux hold great promise. They will come to dominate most of the market I believe. Android phones and tablets will become a large chunk of the tech people use and not desktops. Many of the older people I know are going for a tablet and a smartphone and not bothering with the whole PC upgrade anymore. Most of what they need to do can easily be accomplished using a tablet with much less headache. They don't have to call someone everytime they can't figure something out since there is nothing really to figure out.

Re:Desktops will be in decline the next 10 years

[DogDude]

"But handhelds based upon linux hold great promise. They will come to dominate most of the market I believe." They might take most of the *consumer* market, but not for work. It may be hard to believe, but most people who work and produce things have to do more than email and browse web pages.

Re:Desktops will be in decline the next 10 years

[Wild_dog!]

True, but tablets and phones are in their infancy technologically. I can envision a day where people carry such devices around and when they get to the office, their wireless flatscreen, mouse and keyboard sync with their device automatically and they go about doing business with the device they already have.

I still think the days of the big box are really gone for the most part. The tech of the lightweight powerful mobile devices will only increase over the next 10 years and how they are used today will morph as well.

Maybe

[wjousts]

If most companies weren't already exclusively Windows. A wholesale replacement of all Windows computers with Linux computers would be a lengthy and hugely disruptive process, not to mention the costs of retraining and the risks of finding you can't run some enterprise critical software or piece of hardware. A phased replacement isn't much better either as you still need to train people, some of the risk may be offset, but having an IT department need to support two OS's instead of one increases costs.

So in short, I think difficult economic times make companies less likely to take a risk. And switching to Linux from Windows would be seen (rightly or wrongly) as a huge risk. A new company starting from scratch, or a company that already has a significant mix of Linux boxes, maybe.

No

[jellomizer]

Software License Costs are least of a companies concerns. And if you look in terms of IT Spending you actually see Closed Source Apple and Cloud services coming in full force.

Linux and Free BDS may be cheap in terms of License cost... However if you are going to invest in a business level production system, The difference between $2k for Windows Servers and 0 For Linux is a line item when you are dealing with 30-50k systems. Then it comes down to your current employees skill sets... Besides the popular opinion, companies actually don't like to lay off employees, if they can help it. So if they have a Windows Shop they are going to keep the Windows Administrators (If they can learn or already know Linux is immaterial, as it would be risky to check them on that as their windows admin skills are a known quantity).

What is big now is Cloud, and Thin Clients (Which are not called thin clients). We are seeing companies go to the cloud for many of their non-operational tasks (email, web hosting, file storage...) and more use of Mobile Phones, iPad/tables, Net Books... as a Thin Client host. Because it saves them the upfront cost of installing more expensive hardware and hiring more admins to keep track of these servers for tasks that are not key to business operation.

Now once the economy picks up I can see the Cloud computing becoming less prevalent, because ultimately people want full control of their stuff, and cloud services are only more affordable to a point where it becomes cheaper to host it yourself.

It isn't that Linux is Bad or inferior heck Linux hosts much of those Cloud services. But Software License costs isn't the big savings that companies need.

The year of Linux on the Desktop will be the Year the Desktop is irrelevant.

FOSS or Piracy?

[TehNoobTrumpet]

It's often as easy to pirate as it is to install FOSS, and when money is tight morals are looser than usual.
What makes FOSS more appealing than piracy for a non-power user?
Even with no money to spend, Windows is what most people are used to and what most people will try to stick with one way or another.

Re:FOSS or Piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because. I bought Office XP from a college bookstore in '02. Now, MS is saying that I'm a thief - they got those Windows XP/Office whatever the fuck they are popups asking me to get a real license. Um excuse me? I bought this fucking thing from a legitimate retailer and for the last 7 years I was fine and NOW they're saying I NEED to prove my innocence?!? Fuck off Microsoft! I paid $150 for this shit! and now I'm a thief! Fuck YOU!

Now, if I need a new office suite, I will use LibreOffice and I will ignore the get-a-real-version-of-Office messages.

This is fucking asinine! For 7 years they said shit and now the version I bought at the bookstore at Georgia State Uni is a pirated copy?!? So MS is saying that the GSU bookstore is selling pirated copies of Office XP? That's where I bought the fucker and that's who I'll sue if they press this fucking thing!

MS is saying that the GSU bookstore is selling pirated software.

Actually

[Mycroft_514]

I paid full retail for my first photoshop (version 2.2) back in the day (1994). MS Office? 10$ for a fully licensed version thru my employer (That's professional version, including access and powerpoint).

OS - XP professional came with the machine, I would have to spend a lot of time to replace it, and it WOULD NOT RUN a piece of software on the machine that my company paid 1200$ for.

So, what would Linux cost to implement? No way to tell, because it can not do the job. So once again, the premise is faulty to start with. Linux is not a complete solution.

Broken Windows fallacy?

[havardi]

Pun intended.

They have it all wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

desktop_year_of = "Linux 1996"

dudes - Ad Hominem attack here.

[Anonymous Coward]

...increase the velocity of money.

"Velocity of money"? Hmmmm.

What does the parent sound like? Hmmmmmmmm.An Economist, maybe? Or Satan?!?

As far economists are concerned, supply and demand is what they know. Everything after that is superstition - for a lack of better terms.

Economists, after 75+ years can't figure out if the New Deal did any good!

Anyway ... here's where he's a hypocrite - F/oSS reduces prices for the consumer. That's their argument for off-shoring - cheaper shit means better standard of living for us peons - right?! Therefore, F/oSS boosts the economy by the economist's own fucking standards!

I rest my case, your honor! Shoot the fucking economist!

Re:dudes - Ad Hominem attack here.

[gcnaddict]

Love you too, babe!

Re:dudes - Ad Hominem attack here.

[HornWumpus]

They _all_ know 'if the New Deal did any good!'

And they _all_ come up with economic theories and data to back their 'knowledge'. Kind of backwards, but that's the soft sciences for you. To outsiders it appears they can't figure it out. Insiders understand about 'the heretics' on the other side.

The Year of the Vista Desktop?

[kenh]

According to this news story, Windows Vista has 10x the desktop users that Linux does, yet I don't hear anyone talking about "the Year of the Vista Desktop."

Windows XP, that 10 year-old behemoth has nearly 1/2 of all user desktops around the world, Windows 7 on about 1/4th of all desktops and Windows Vista on about 1/10th - Linux is struggling to make one out of every 100 desktops world-wide.

Re:The Year of the Vista Desktop?

[Nerdfest]

All you've really stated here is that this is obviously not about quality.

Re:The Year of the Vista Desktop?

[rubycodez]

but is over 30% of mobile devices, and projected to be two-thirds of mobile devices in three years. maybe Linux skips the whole desktop fad and takes over the world anyway

The poor economy justifies a lot, but ....

[King_TJ]

Trying to argue that people will switch to open-source solutions in large numbers because of the economic crisis is futile. For the typical home user, a computer system purchase revolves around getting the best deal they can find on something (typically via a local retailer), and chances are very good those machines are still bundled with Microsoft Windows. Alternately, a growing minority of users are making the trek to an Apple store, where they can buy a commercial alternative to Windows with a new machine for a little bit more money up front (but a promise of better resale value down the road).

From what I've seen, most of these people have more motivation to stick with a commercial OS rather than try Linux because they want to re-use some existing software they bought previously. The idea of saving money with open-source software in the future doesn't do much for them, really. (Most of the time, they're not really sure what's out there for an OS like Linux or BSD in the first place. Being free, open-source software, the developers obviously aren't spending any money on advertising on TV or in the print media to tell people about their programs.)

For small business users, a computer and related software purchases are usually a tax write-off anyway - so they're not real motivated to switch to and learn to use something totally new/different either.

The *few* people I know who did purchase a new computer with Linux pre-installed keep running into headaches when they need to call for technical support. EG. One lady with a Netbook running Ubuntu had problems recently when she signed up for AT&T U-Verse. Nobody on their support line could walk her through the steps needed to connect her wireless card to their wireless router they supplied, and despite telling them she was using "Ubuntu" - they insisted that was just "some program running on top of Windows", and she "probably has Windows 7".

Re:The poor economy justifies a lot, but ....

[rubycodez]

She didn't have a friend she could rely on to help with her Linux issues? I help out my friends who switch to linux, because they soon don't need anymore help. Unlike my relatives who refuse and stay on windows, they constantly call my younger brother for help for various disasters or puzzling windows behavior.

No, it won't be the YOTLD

[dkleinsc]

This isn't because Linux is technically a bad choice, and definitely not because it's more expensive (TCO arguments were pretty close to bogus when they first came out, and have become steadily more bogus as more techies have become familiar with Linux). It's because markets for operating systems don't operate in the way that standard microeconomics tells you it ought to.

The 2 big reasons are:
1. The person making the decision about which OS to install typically is not the person using the computer.
2. Apple, Google, and Microsoft in particular have shown no qualms about using their market power to force their customers to use only their products. For instance, over the last couple of years any company that was selling both Linux and Windows 7 netbooks has dropped their Linux lines. That doesn't look to me like spontaneous market forces.

I like Linux, I use Linux both at work and at home, I think it's far superior to MS Windows and has some advantages over OS X as well. But that doesn't mean it's going to become the dominant OS any time soon.

Simple answer ...

[MacTO]

A) Those licenses for commercial software are paid for, and if a company doesn't have the money to purchase new software licenses they probably don't have the money for new hardware.

B) Most of the licenses that I've dealt with allow the license to be transfered from one machine to another, at least within an organization and particularly for the types of software that FLOSS can replace. So if a new machine is purchased and an old one is retired, the license is still paid for.

C) If there is an economic crunch, chances are that the businesses are retaining current staffing levels (if they aren't actually going down). So the number of licenses required will stay the same, if not decline. Again, everything is paid for.

D) Retraining and rolling out an entirely different system will cost money. I highly doubt that they would save any money on managing their systems either, since Microsoft provides fairly extensive management tools (many of which I haven't seen the likes of under Linux).

For consumers, (A) and (B) still apply.

Re:Simple answer ...

[pseudonomous]

(B) is un-true for an OEM license of any operating system AFAIK

Re:Simple answer ...

[MacTO]

Agreed. On the other hand, any organization of sufficient size shouldn't be buggering around with OEM licenses. Smaller organizations are unlikely to have the IT resources to handle switching to Linux.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

If the money isn't spent on software licenses, it will be spent on something else. That something else will be, quite obviously, something which is valued more -- not less -- than software licenses. (If the software license was determined to be a better value, than naturally the money will go to the software license.)

This isn't rocket science, folks.

Open source cannibalizes ...

[perpenso]

Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc.

FOSS has largely cannibalized the support contracts of traditional Unix vendors and displaced the proprietary versions of Unix formerly used on new equipment. FOSS did not really generate new economic activity, it commoditized formerly premium priced services. Its questionable whether commodity based pricing has increased economic activity, companies at the low end would probably have purchased a virtual SunOS host rather than a virtual Linux host. Now for hobbyists FOSS has been a great boon, but I'm not sure their usage translates into much economic activity.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[orasio]

So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[perpenso]

So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard. I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company. And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.

Google would have found some other hardware/software combination to boot strap itself. You seem to be confusing a convenience with a necessity.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[jedidiah]

No. Sometimes money is important and so is scalability.

If a system is too expensive to be built, it never will be built. The operational costs will drag down the entire operation to the point where it collapses.

Cheap solutions make some problems solvable. There's really no getting around that.

Fixating on SunOS is a great example because Sun hardware in general back in the day did not scale well enough for some tasks regardless of how much money you wanted to throw at a problem. It's a really poor example to bring up here.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[Kyont]

And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.

Do you remember what it was like trying to search for anything before Google? Everything else was useless by comparison. Let us not take for granted how easy Google made it to locate useful and relevant information quickly. Sure, they are now essentially an advertising company, but their positive effect on the productivity of hundreds of millions of people has been huge.

(Said the guy surfing Slashdot).

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[perpenso]

No. Sometimes money is important and so is scalability. If a system is too expensive to be built, it never will be built. The operational costs will drag down the entire operation to the point where it collapses. Cheap solutions make some problems solvable. There's really no getting around that. Fixating on SunOS is a great example because Sun hardware in general back in the day did not scale well enough for some tasks regardless of how much money you wanted to throw at a problem. It's a really poor example to bring up here.

I'm not fixating on Sun, that's just one of the more obvious examples of cannibalization. Google could have gone done many other paths as well. I'm not 100% sure but at the time of the first round of investment wasn't Google operating on less than 100 PCs? Scalability may only become an issue long after they had investor funding so it may not be the dire problem you suggest. Again, Linux sure was convenient but it is highly questionably that it was a necessity.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[TheRaven64]

Do you remember what it was like trying to search for anything before Google? Everything else was useless by comparison

I remember AltaVista being about as good. I switched because the AltaVista search page became so bloated that it took 30 seconds to load over my modem, not because of better results from Google. I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo after the replaced the clean and simple UI with a usability disaster.

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[orasio]

Whoooshhhh!!!

Re:Open source cannibalizes ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, you're right. My comment was notably clueless (I'll plead lack of caffeine at the time) and I should probably just slink away. In a fair and just world, there would now be some sort of ritualized shaming where you rip the bars off my nerd uniform and are allowed to take over my lower user number.

Troll alert

[drdrgivemethenews]

Is there any way to redirect this whole thread into /dev/null? We've been through all this so many times before.

Systems theory defines information as data that causes one to change one's mind about something (it's a surprisingly useful definition). So, since no one on this thread is going to change their mind on account of the arguments presented here, the entire thread is information free.

Re:Troll alert

[pseudonomous]

curl http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/08/02/1736215/Are-Bad-Economic-Times-Good-for-Free-Software > /dev/null

It's always the year of the Linux Desktop

[revjtanton]

How many times has it been "the year of Linux" over the years?

I don't know if it's the year of Linux or not, but I think with economic times being what they are it is certainly a good time to brush up on some skills and strengthen your resume.

You can do that at WiBit.net

Year of the linux desktop?

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Haha, keep dreaming pal. A more accurate title would be "Year of the pirate copies."
Most people I know around here would rather get an illegitimate copy of windows/mac than switch to any linux OS.

The other possibility

[callmebill]

I posit that it's more tempting to steal the software you need and are accustomed to, more than it is tempting to move to foss alternatives.

Bundled OS is a steep hurdle for Linux

[perpenso]

Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC

Either you need to include Apple computers, in which case it's not everyone, or else your definition of PC is so narrow it wouldn't include a Linux PC anyway.

The GP seems fundamentally correct, let me rephrase things. New computers generally come with a bundled OS, Windows or Mac OS X, and consumers generally see no need to replace either OS with Linux. The switching cost does not seem to exceed the perceived benefits. You can argue the consumers are mistaken but the GP's point that a bundled OS is an incredible hurdle for Linux on the desktop is correct.

That makes you an economics terrorist

[z-j-y]

because you want the economy to collapse for your own agenda.

Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop

[QuietLagoon]

It ain't never gonna happen. Linux is too fractured for the mass-market. I know the Linux supporters see the proliferation of versions as A Good Thing. Unfortunately, the mass marketplace does not. Unless and until the Linux supporters face the reality of the mass marketplace, there will never be the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Re:Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop

[jedidiah]

Fanboys like to brag about 10% marketshare and they have a platform that was fully formed 7 years before the first line of the Linux kernel was written. Apple also effectively had a 10 year head start on Microsoft in terms of ease of use technology. Apple was competing against MS-DOS with a far better system.

"fracturing" has nothing to do with anything. PCs and Android phones are a great counterexample.

Market success is about marketing success. You have superbowl ads, effective TV ads, and your own stores.

Despite all of this, the best that Apple fanboys can brag about is finally breaking the 10% mark and how it's been 20 years coming.

Torpedoed by what Microsoft had to offer in 1991...

Re:Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop

[QuietLagoon]

"fracturing" has nothing to do with anything.

.
It has all to do with being able to set the image of a product in the marketplace. Linux has all the hurdles that Apple had to clear, plus a product that has not solidified its identity, except that it is "free" "as in beer". One Linux distribution targets this part of the market, another Linux distribution targets another part of the market, yet another Linux distribution targets yet another part of the market.

When a consumer walks into Best Buy to buy a PC, what Linux distribution will that consumer select for that PC? Will the consumer be able, or even want, to make the choice? The consumer just wants a PC to run some applications and do things on the web, why the burden of selecting which Linux to use?

Even the car manufacturers learned this lesson in the 80's when The Japanese manufacturers drastically reduced the options available in cars by mandating "mandatory options" that drastically reduced the number of options available.

Your mention of Apple's success is a canard, because Apple did not get the 10% OS share on the back of the OS, but rather on the back of the ecosystem created by iTunes and iPhone.

Pure Fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Server Linux rocks. Desktop Linux sucks. This should tell you that Linux is fit for programmers but is a long way off being the OS for the rest of us.

While the OP has spent years waiting for the Year of the Linux Desktop, Apple quietly became a popular vendor of a Unix-based OS. It doesn't shout 'UNIX!' at you because it has a lot of eye-candy. But fire up a terminal window and things start to look familiar if idiosyncratic.

I guess this is why Shuttleworth seems hell-bent on emulating Mac OS X with Ubuntu. But his approach does not sit well with many open-source developers, especially as he seems to the lack the skills of diplomacy needed when herding cats.

I've used various Linux distros on the desktop and three issues recur: (1) Frequent crashes, (2) Crappy graphics/font rendering, and (3) Spotty hardware support.

Mac OS X doesn't have those issues (unless you're running Flash of course) so until Linux achieves that parity, it will remain a server OS and a fine one at that.

Uh-huh.

[Carik]

Absolutely.

When the economy collapses, the first thing everyone will do is run out to become a computer expert so they can install and run linux. Corporations will replace their entire IT staff with people who know linux, and the average person on the street will suddenly realize that what they really need to do to cope with a failed economy is LEARN A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!

Or, you know, people might just keep using what they're using while they hope things get better. Because that will leave them time to work enough jobs to buy food.

Re:Uh-huh.

[jedidiah]

Most places with an "IT staff" are already doing Unix and have been for decades.

Anyone able to be a competent NT admin will have no problem with Unix. It's the idiots that aren't really terribly good at supporting NT that would have problems with Unix.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Carik]

For there server folks, maybe. But a lot of desktop support people are pretty focused on one OS, in my experience. They'll be able to do anything you need with Windows, but not really know anything about Mac or Linux.

And someone who has spent the last 15 years learning to admin Windows servers isn't necessarily going to be able to just step in and make a linux server do what they want; there IS a learning curve, and while it's not all that steep, it means linux servers aren't going to be a "Yeah, I can have that for you tomorrow" kind of deal.

Re:Uh-huh.

[jedidiah]

This is about being intelligent and adaptable, not "smart". Stuff changes, even with Windows. If you really dedicated the last 15 years of supporting it, you could probably describe the evolution of the product in excruciating detail.

If you can't handle a little screwball, then you're going to be bailed out by those that can.

Those might be the competent NT admins or even a Unix admin.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to learn a new OS when they update to Vista or Win7, or even those who are moving to OS X or use net books. Doesn't really seem to be that much of an impedence.

Just in case...

[geoffrobinson]

Just in case people don't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Re:Just in case...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole broken window parable is subject to a parallel of the second law of thermodynamics. While the net transfer of money in {broken window | no broken window} is the same the efficiency of the shopkeeper whose window is at stake is higher if he does not have to pay for his window to be repaired. While the service of glaziers will undoubtedly still be needed (as genuine accidents do happen) the useful work extracted from the system will be higher (given optimum employ of the shopkeeper's assets) if the window is not broken.

i dont care how much FOSS costs

[Anonymous Coward]

when are people going to realize open source isnt about the price tag. it is about treating software like infrastructure instead of a product. the year of the linux desktop wont come until it is marketed as the best option, not the cheapest option.

no because you can't fix

[Locutus]

ignorant. Really, you can't because they don't want to listen to something which says they've been doing it wrong all these years. And then there is the "nobody ever gets fired for choosing Microsoft" mantra and the desire to blend in so you're not a target for the layoff. So no, you'll only see a small uptick in OSS in a down economy and what you'll probably see is more piracy and/or longer refresh cycles. IMO

LoB

Give me your money.

[bobs666]

I will be happy to spend it for you.

Where as the society would be better off with more use of FOSS. The government has no place using proprietary software or proprietary data formats. Thank you.

The Bad Economy will not change Linux Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on my conversations with people and watching trends. The bad economy isn't changing any usage habits.
- users, based on 2008, 2009 times - spending plenty on higher grade products like IPAD, IPOD, iMac
- corporations - just stop buying anything optional, just what is required. Most corp's are locked into Windows
- in 2008 and 2009 - Linux % didn't grow.
- 2007 - Windows Vista did the most for Linux growth. Nothing like faulty competition. However, Linux has stagnated as Windows 7 and Mac have dominated.
- the broke still shop at Wally world and Wally world sells .....

Breaking windows fallacy . . . again

[Idou]

Breaking windows results in more people buying new windows, which increases the velocity of money, so breaking windows is good for the economy . . .

Software is a means, not an end. Having a large variety of free and open tools allows for more combinations of products and services towards a better customized solution end. The overall ecosystem produces a greater economic benefit than a small group of monopoly rent seeking firms peddling proprietary licenses. Not only that, but an ecosystem of diverse strategies should be more resilient to economics shocks from silly Washington politics and a self destructive Wall Street.

Or just simple economics, software is a cost for most firms. When the cost of inputs decreases, companies can and will produce more.

You guys remind me of Linus...

[realinvalidname]

...Van Pelt, from "Peanuts", sitting out in the pumpkin patch every Halloween, convinced that his sincerity will be rewarded by a visit from the Great Pumpkin.

I didn't think that anyone was seriously predicting the "Year of the Linux Desktop" anymore, which ran its course as a failed prediction about five years ago, and became tiresome even as a joke a couple years after that.

The flat line that Adobe cited in giving up on AIR for Linux tells the story of Desktop Linux's stagnation over the last few years pretty succinctly, and there were plenty of recessionary years in the last decade that should already have provided ample opportunity for cost-conscious users to switch. Hasn't happened, and there is no plausible reason to think it will now.

Re:You guys remind me of Linus...

[jedidiah]

You are trying to hang your hat on Adobe AIR? You must be joking.

How exactly does that impact me as a Linux user? How would it impact you as a WinDOS user if a similar thing happened on that platform?

No. You are the one playing Linus Van Pelt. Perhaps the author is too.

Your AIR fixation is just plain sad.

Linux may not be taking over the world but it also isn't going anywhere.

You can win the minds of the old school

[bobs666]

Windows uses have never used a real computer. So have no idea what they are missing. all they know is they got to have there Office. and that no substitutes are welcome.

Software ports at the software level. That makes many hardware platforms work at all levels from a phone to a super computer. Free open source software can be modified wins over binaries. Most if the innovations in Windows was implemented as free software years before Redmond took the idea.

Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[Okian Warrior]

Linux, and open source in general, will never be that popular, simply because of cognitive load. It's software designed by engineers, with no clear understanding of style or ergonomics.

To use a car example, it's like a car with high torque and excellent gas mileage, but ugly to look at and the instruments are labelled differently and in the back seat. I don't mean that the instruments are *different*, I mean that they are conceived and implemented in an inconvenient manner.

Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations. Some even take the trouble to engage focus groups of customers to find out what features are confusing, what aspects are uncomfortable, what looks ugly. They take this information and change their product for the better.

For the most part, the success of Apple products is for this reason: the iPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it's usability and aesthetic appeal and robustness made it highly popular.

Open source, on the other hand, is usually done by a lead engineer putting in most of the effort. The results usually have the following pattern:

1) Documentation: Writing documentation is boring. Put up a wiki and let the users fill in the details.
2) Aesthetic looks: This is not important. Give the user a panel to change the environment to suit their tastes.
3) Compatibility: Not important. Our package has "close file" (alt-file-close), but we've assigned the function to a different key.
4) Simplicity: More features is better! Try viewing the man page for "ls" some time. Or gcc. Or just about anything.
5) Descriptives: Don't choose descriptive names for anything. Instead of "Internet Explorer", "Paint Shop Pro" and "Media Player", use terms like "Gimp, Firefox, and VLC".

This last is one reason why old folks have a tough time using the new technology. They have to learn a completely new language: Every random word that they *thought* they knew ("gimp", "apache") means something different in the new system.

Gimme a break.

The software engineers have done a good job making robust, strong, functional packages.

Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation? Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?

Until the engineers get a clue, linux and related open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects.

Making good software is more than robust coding.

Re:Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[jedidiah]

...except none of that explains why MS-DOS won the market and "the year of Macintosh" is just like "the year of Linux".

Re:Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Drivel. Bleet bleet. It's always someone elses job isn't it. You miss that the niche is not just hobbyist projects but major infrastructure and embedded and specialist niches which are extremely profitable. People will either see this and get a clue, join the engineers (oh their people too) and fix the things most important to them, and profit or they won't and they can consume the predigested fodder solutions they do at the moment and good luck to them. We're all too tired of trying to convince people that the alternatives are real, better, more flexible, scalable, free and Free when that's not enough to convince them that they might want to learn something new or indeed put in as much effort as they do currently into the closed alternative whilst paying through the nose.

Re:Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm feeding the troll... This post is from 12 years ago.

Both gnome and KDE have usability groups and HIGs, and all enterprise linux dists are based on one or t'other.

iPods robust? Gimme a break. (Or rather, don't - my family of iPods have been the least reliable mp3 players I've had. 2 out of 2 have broken compared with 0 out of 2 no-name mp3 players of similar vintage. Maybe modern solid state ones are better but they will always suffer - by design - from complexity over reliability. Not that they don't have good features, it's just that reliability isn't one of them.)

1) Open source wiki documentation has IME nearly always been better than vendor supplied documentation (even when there is a manpage). It's the bazaar - many users inevitably turn up more corner cases than a small development team, bitch about them on the wiki / random group, get them fixed, leave the documentation trail in place so google can find it. An individual thread might not be reliable, but neither are most OEM manuals.

2) Come off it. GTK+ / KDE applications both respect DE look and feel (the QT GTK look and feel and vice versa) and while KDE is more customisable there are generally a sane set of defaults. Certainly if you're using a corporate mandated environment you wouldn't spot anything particularly weird.

3) True to some extent, but much better than 10 years ago. Most keyboard shortcuts seem to be standardising, certainly within a DE - and generally seem to be the same as Windows / common branded software.

4) Those utilities are designed to be flexible, yet the default output is useful. Try something like K3B, which is extremely simple to use, feature packed (better than Nero IMO) - or VLC. VLC can be made to do a staggering range of things using command-line flags or config settings yet its default is intelligent and will generally Do The Right Thing.

5) On my default install, Firefox is listed in the Internet start menu section as "Firefox Web Browser (web browser)", GIMP I don't have installed but Krita (which suffers from a similar name oddness) is listed in the Graphics start menu section as "Krita (Painting and Image Editing)" and VLC is listed in the Multimedia start menu section as "VLC multimedia player". If it wasn't for the fact that I've installed some extra apps since the default install they would be pretty unambiguous too. IME old folks don't particularly have a hard time adapting to the new technology. My mother could do it, my arts grad wife could do it, the younger generation won't particularly have the decade+ of m$ autoassociation.

Making good software is sure more than robust coding. It's also providing a good user experience - one that doesn't come with spamware pre-loaded, for example. One that doesn't act in ways you don't expect (cough cough, Drive Letter Access...) and lets you revert to the default...

But robust coding is a damn good start. The number of viruses and malware that are willingly downloaded and installed by M$ users looking for malware protection is shocking, sometimes onto virgin iron and often because their faith in the OS vendor is so shockingly low. How much damaging malware is being downloaded for OSX / Linux / OpenBSD?

Re:Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Right - because 'Video Lan Client' really doesn't have anything to do with what the software does. Nope. not a bit.

Re:Linux on the desktop? Never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

"Where are the open source tech writers? The ones who take that part of the problem and work alongside the engineers to ensure quality documentation?"

Tech writers go home and do something else. Open source coders generally enjoy coding enough to do it all the time.

That is not an argument for not switching . . .

[Idou]

but an argument for avoiding proprietary software from the beginning. Working on a start-up? Better avoid lock-in or you will live to regret it . . .

Re:That is not an argument for not switching . . .

[JustSomeProgrammer]

If you're building a business from the ground up I can see putting tech on linux from the beginning (I think most start-ups do) but you still have to pay retraining costs for anyone else who works for you. I don't know too many people who work in marketing or design that can use linux effectively from the get go. (Most designers seem to prefer mac really and they like photoshop). Unless you're putting "Must know linux" on your job description for every position. Then you're limiting you pool of potential talent.

Also something I've found

[Sycraft-fu]

There's a saying I've seen on the Internet that is very true to enterprise Linux support "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." I find it to be quite true.

We do multi-OS support where I work (all integrated) and Linux is one of them. It works fine, we've got it integrated in to our central system along with Windows, Solaris, and OS-X, it is managed all that jazz.

However what I find is that making Linux work is a lot more labour intensive than Windows or OS-X (don't get me started on the hell that is Solaris, it is going away soon hopefully). Our Linux lead has to spend a lot of time hacking around to get things working as they need to, and it involves a fair bit of programming (which is not the same skillset as systems administration). There usually isn't any money involved in getting the tools, just a lot of staff time, and thus money there, spent making it work as it should.

A counterpoint to that would be OS-X. It's built in enterprise support was... Lacking to say the least and the only real option was to buy a program to fix it. However that money spent was all it took, once we had the program it is more or less zero effort to get the systems joined up and working. Little in the way of staff time, but no small chunk of change in terms of software to make it happen, never mind the high cost of the systems themselves.

I'm not pointing to either as being the right way or better or anything, just saying that you have to consider time spent on Linux as a real cost. If you have to have more people to work on it, and those people need more skills, and they spend more time to make it work, those costs have to be factored in. You can't point to licensing cost savings and say "See! We spend so much less!"

It could well be worth it, but be honest about the costs. Something Windows does have going for it is good enterprise support. Their tools are great, anyone who hates on Active Directory for authentication/management has never seen it handle a large organization and do so easily and well. You do pay for it, but it can be worth it.

Re:Also something I've found

[Bert64]

Out of interest, what were you trying to get the systems "joined up and working" with?
If it was an Active Directory environment then of course it would be more difficult to join anything non windows to it, that's how it's designed, so MS can claim "support" for joining non windows systems, but intentionally make it as difficult as possible to discourage you from using such systems.

Also the biggest problem with AD is security, get yourself an internal pen test and give them just a single ethernet socket to get started... If they're remotely competent they will have domain admin access before lunchtime.

Re:Also something I've found

[Sycraft-fu]

Sun LDAP is at the core of our authentication. We also have an Active Directory, which syncs to it via IDSync (a Sun product). The big thing that all systems then access with that central authentication is a NetApp filer.

Every year is TYOTLD...

[toadlife]

...for 1% of desktops.

facts disagree with you

[Lazy Jones]

If your - reasonable sounding - arguments were correct,

• - Apple would rule the desktop due to the superior aesthetics and usability of OSX
• - Ubuntu's Market share would far surpass that of Windows XP (same reason plus it's much cheaper)

So what is really happening? It's called momentum. Microsoft has trained users over the past decades to accept inferior usability and engineering - not necessarily to Linux in many aspects, but to various alternatives that existed over the years - as the industry standard. People simply refuse to learn how to use an OSX or Linux desktop, the same way they do not accept a new spreadsheet software unless it's called Excel (even if it is totally different from the previous version - they simply trust it!). The iPod and IPad were not the first products in their respective markets by far, but people weren't trained to one particular look & feel (physically and regarding the UI), so Apple had a chance to succeed and used it well. Now it's up to Apple to establish an industry standard, at least for smartphones and tablets and make use of the momentum they're gaining over the next 10+ years to dominate the market...

Whether you like it or not, both engineering and usabilty/asthetics are less important than people's habits. If you are old enough to remember the home computer platform wars, you'll know ...

No way Jose

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Linux for over half a decade, mostly GNOME. It is the only desktop to have anything resembling accessibility software (screen readers/magnifiers) available. Problem is, it is too freaking slow. Even with the screen reader on, if I press alt+f2 to run a program, it takes about 1 second for the window to appear sometimes! This is on a hexacore computer with 8 gigs of memory. I recently bought Windows 7 and it is much faster in terms of UI responsiveness.

Gnome generally works pretty well, but instead of fixing these issues and delivering an optimized product with increased performance, the developers are doing the whole "let's re-invent the wheel" thing that so many FOSS projects suffer from.

Political decisions

[Nicolai Haehnle]

Actually, this depends heavily on the political climate. In most countries, there was a time of two or three decades after the Second World War when wealth flowed downwards overall. It was a slow movement to be sure, but when you look at indicators like inequality, or the share of national income that goes towards wages (as opposed to rents) the trend was clearly in favor of the "small guy".

Then the politics changed, and for the last few decades we have seen the same movement but in reverse.

What this boils down to is that there is nothing inevitable about a flow upward. It comes down to political choice - though one thing that I would agree with is that a government that does not enforce strong regulations tends to favor flows that go upwards.

Re:Political decisions

[AthanasiusKircher]

In most countries, there was a time of two or three decades after the Second World War when wealth flowed downwards overall. It was a slow movement to be sure, but when you look at indicators like inequality, or the share of national income that goes towards wages (as opposed to rents) the trend was clearly in favor of the "small guy".

Not to mention the structure of the tax system, at least in the U.S. For two decades after WWII, the top tax bracket hovered around 90%, so the richest people were only keeping 10% of their nominal income. Even if their nominal incomes look high, that's important to keep in mind. And until the Reagan tax cuts in 1980, they were always about 70%. Meanwhile, the bottom tax bracket was always below 25% after about a decade following WWII.

While taxes aren't everything, the tax system for about 40 years after WWII was incredibly progressive compared to today.

Free market vs. trickle-down economics

[Nicolai Haehnle]

If you actually produce something useful, people will want it.

But will they have enough money to pay you for it?

The distinction between notional and effective demand is crucial for understanding what's been going on for the last few decades. In fact, it is the reason why trickle-down economics cannot generate progress in the long run.

When wealth is shifted towards the top-end-of-town (as has been happening in pretty much all Western countries over the last few decades), this means less money is available to consumers. This reduces the potential size of the market that producers can sell to, and supply-side economics fails.

It is absolutely crucial for free-market capitalism to work properly that the vast majority of the population is relative well-off, i.e. has gainful employment that pays a relatively comfortable wage/salary. When consumers have more money available to buy optional goods, this creates a much larger potential customer base for entrepreneurs to target, and everybody wins.

Re:Free market vs. trickle-down economics

[Arlet]

But will they have enough money to pay you for it?

They will, if they also produce something of value. If so, we can trade those useful things with each other, and grow our wealth.

If the majority of the people aren't adding much value, you can't fix the economy by just increasing the rate at which money changes hands, or by increasing the money supply.

Of course, there are some exceptions where you need to start with money, such as people taking a loan in order to pay tuition, or to start/grow a business.

Re:Free market vs. trickle-down economics

[Nicolai Haehnle]

But will they have enough money to pay you for it?

They will, if they also produce something of value. If so, we can trade those useful things with each other, and grow our wealth.

This line of thought would work if the cycles of money in our economy were simple enough to be easily replaced by barter.

If you just have two people trading with each other and both are short of money, then they can just directly trade goods of value and nothing of importance is lost. Unfortunately, the flows of money in our economy are too complicated for that.

Imagine a restaurant owner who had to close due to lack of business and an unemployed engineer. Both produce something of value, and both may be interested in what the other has to offer. But they cannot just do trade with each other in isolation: the restaurant owner needs to employ staff and get ingredients, and the engineer can only put his skills to work in a larger operation. In a well working economy this is not a problem, because money can be used to represent values exchanged. Once both have run out of money, however, they're stuck in a Catch-22 type situation that is impossible to escape without collective action.

Re:Free market vs. trickle-down economics

[toadlife]

They will, if they also produce something of value. If so, we can trade those useful things with each other, and grow our wealth

You are missing the GP's point. Over the last 30 years, our economy has grown at a rate no faster than the rate it grew before trickle down economics policies were put into place. The only effect of trickle down economics has been to shift the collective wealth of the economy towards the top.

That trend is unsustainable and some form wealth redistribution is the only way to keep the economy from eventually imploding on itself.

Re:Free market vs. trickle-down economics

[TheRaven64]

They will, if they also produce something of value.

And if they can sell it to someone who wants it so that they can then afford what you have to sell. Unless, by some coincidence, you both produce the thing that the other wants, which is very rare. Which means moving money around...

Mod parent up

[Nicolai Haehnle]

To clarify, in the savings rate that the parent linked to, paying down debt is also considered saving.

This is ultimately very reasonable, because whether you pay down a debt or pay into a savings account, the result is the same from a flows perspective: that money is a leakage that no longer adds to aggregate demand, and so consumption is less. Whether the savings flow adds to a savings stock or removes from a debt stock does not matter for the volume of goods and services traded in the economy (which is what GDP more or less measures).

BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do the BSD still get a mention like this? Linux is the only realistic free software OS.

Bank lending doesn't work that way

[Nicolai Haehnle]

If the money is placed in the bank, the bank has more money to lend to businesses

This is incorrect. The ability of a bank to make loans is not limited by the amount of deposits that it has. It is only limited by the amount of capital the bank has, but deposits do not count as capital (for good reasons). The bank only benefits from your deposits because it makes it slightly cheaper for them to lend.

You may want to read this explanation for some background.

Actually, the problem with our current economy is that we do not have sufficient amounts of captial in reserve to supply funds to those who wish to take advantage of new business opportunities.

Not true. There is lots of capital to go around, as you can see by how easily huge companies like Apple, Google and MSFT are able to get insane amounts of money. So why does that capital not flow to take advantage of new business opportunities?

The answer is simple: There are very few promising new business opportunities in the current economic climate, because consumers do not have enough money.

At least part of this problem could be relieved by instituting programs to create jobs for the unemployed, since the unemployed are obviously the ones with the least amount of money available and would therefore give the largest multiplier effects.

Re:Bank lending doesn't work that way

[Attila Dimedici]

I'm confused, what do banks do with the money people deposit in them if they do not lend it out?
Huge companies do not ever invest in the types of new business opportunities that drive an economy. The best way to drive the economy is to make it simpler for someone to start a small one or two person business. Those are the types of business that most readily meet unmet needs in a down economy. The types of business opportunity that are available in an economy in the shape the current economy is in do not lend themselves to the size of investment/return that are necessary fo r a company like those you listed to bother even looking at them.
Of course the biggest barrier to these kinds of businesses is government regulation. I recently read a story about a woman who was fighting the California dairy board. She said that to be regulated and inspected would cost her $100,000. A few years ago she bought a cow to get raw milk for her grandson (story does not say why). People found out that she was doing this and came to her for raw milk. She sold them shares in her cow and bought a second one. Now the state wants to shut her down. Under California law, the owner of a cow may drink its milk filtered but unpasteurized. She contends that the people who bought shares are part owners of the cows she has and are entitled to their share of the milk. The state contends that it is a commercial transaction and subject to state food safety laws.

Re:Bank lending doesn't work that way

[Nicolai Haehnle]

I'm confused, what do banks do with the money people deposit in them if they do not lend it out?

There are a number of different levels on which this question can be answered depending on your perspective.

The first level is: your deposit at the bank is simply a number in their database. This number simply cannot be lent out in any meaningful way. It is just a number after all.

The second level deals with the way our payment and clearing system works, and in that case, the answer depends on how you deposit your money in the bank. If you deposit cash, then the bank will sort that cash and put it back into its ATMs, where it can be withdrawn either by you or by other people with deposits at the bank. If you deposit a check, it depends on who that check is drawn on. If it is drawn on an account at the same bank, then the bank simply adjusts its internal database. If it is drawn on an account at a different bank, then those banks will talk with each other, and initiate a transfer of reserves between their reserve accounts at the Fed.

If, at the end of the day, your bank has more reserves than required in its account at the Fed thanks to your deposit, then this typically means that another bank will be low on reserves. Then those banks will talk with each other and will arrange for overnight lending to be done between the banks - but note that no money is lent out to non-banks. The bank may also decide to buy treasuries using those reserves, which you can think of as the bank shifting its reserves (= high-powered money) from a checking account (the reserve account) to a savings account (the treasuries) so that it may earn a higher interest. More typically though, they will perform overnight lending, using treasuries as backing for the loans.

What you can glean from this is that a bank benefits from attracting deposits, because it might otherwise be short of reserves. Now being short of reserves does not prevent a bank from lending out money. However, it does mean that the bank will have to borrow reserves either from another bank or from the Fed (whose main purpose, besides running the payment system, is to act as lender of last resort). This reduces the profit margin for the bank.

The final level deals with the question of whether the bank changes its behavior when lending to non-banks. The answer here is that as long as a bank has enough capital, they will lend to anybody they consider credit-worthy. The people who make the lending decisions do not even know how many deposits are at the bank!

Huge companies do not ever invest in the types of new business opportunities that drive an economy.

Agreed. My point (which might not have come across very clearly) was that there is lots of capital to go around overall, but few lucrative business opportunities, which is why investors flee into assets they perceive as safe, such as bonds of huge companies. This is how companies like Google etc. are currently so easily capable of filling their war chests with money.

The best way to drive the economy is to make it simpler for someone to start a small one or two person business. Those are the types of business that most readily meet unmet needs in a down economy. The types of business opportunity that are available in an economy in the shape the current economy is in do not lend themselves to the size of investment/return that are necessary for a company like those you listed to bother even looking at them.

Well, again, you misread the intention of my point.

By the way, I agree that the best way for an economy to develop healthily is to make it simple to start a business. Thing is, the number one problem of new businesses is to get paying customers, but for some weird reason only few people ever talk about that in this particular context. It's as if everybody ignored the elephant in the room. I have my suspicions as to why that is the case, but let's not

Re:Bank lending doesn't work that way

[Attila Dimedici]

Well, you obviously are a believer in the consumption driven economic model. I'm a believer in the production driven economic model. The way to drive the economy is to produce something that people want. The U.S. is in the problem it is currently in because our politicians have focused on encouraging people to consume rather than on encouraging people to produce. As a result, we have, in a manner of speaking, consumed much of our seed corn. You cannot get further economic growth by consuming the rest of it.

Re:Bank lending doesn't work that way

[Nicolai Haehnle]

Obviously, the economy needs both consumption and production.

To figure out which side holds the root of the current weakness of the economy (in terms of real measures like unemployment), I prefer to make a "mental diff" of before/after the financial crisis.

Up until the financial crisis, things seemed to be going fine. (We now know that the seeds of the crisis were being planted, but back then, things were looking good.) Consumption and production went hand in hand and everybody was happy, more or less.

Now ask yourself: which part of the equation was changed by the financial crisis? Did it rob the country of entrepreneurs? Did the crisis create significant new regulation or other legal barriers to doing business? Did it rob the country of financial capital? Or did the financial crisis cause the consumption part of the economy to collapse because people's mortgages were suddenly under water? I say the answers are No, No (as far as the financial sector is concerned: unfortunately), No (perhaps temporarily, but that has long since passed), Yes (the mortgage problem may be less visible in the media these days, but it's far from gone, and unemployment has reached proportions were it becomes a vicious cycle).

The problem isn't so much that people have been encouraged to consume - production would be pointless without consumption - but that that consumption was largely enabled by private debt (mortgages and credit cards) to the extent that the savings rate was actually negative. This arrangement was unsustainable and collapsed in the financial crisis, so the consumption part of the economy is now missing.

The troubling aspect is that if the consumption part is missing for too long, then the production part will decay, too. Businesses go bankrupt when they can no longer find customers, and then employees are laid off. If those employees remain unemployed for a longer time (and this is happening now), then valuable skills may be lost as well.

On a more philosophical note: While producers and entrepreneurs clearly play an important role, yes, I do believe that the economy should be ultimately guided by consumption, because what's the point of the economy if it doesn't ultimately provide for consumers? Besides, every time somebody says people can/should vote with their wallet, they are essentially saying that the economy should be driven by consumption.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you already lost the battle if you're reduced to hoping that a global financial meltdown might be the thing the finally makes a difference?

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

The year of the Linux desktop!
Good luck with that!

Modern Monetary Theory

[Nicolai Haehnle]

Do we need to carry on that "risk of default"-bullshit? The US never were in any economical risk of default, given their top credit rating. Debt/GDP ratio has been worse in history and is worse in countries working just fine right now.

You can go even further. There is never any economical risk of default for a government that issues its own currency and only issues debt that is denominated in that currency. In fact, it is even misleading to think of US government bonds as debt. It's more like a savings account (as opposed to the reserve accounts at the Fed, which are like checking accounts). You can read more about the basic observations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) here. Debt/GDP ratios or anything like that really don't matter: the US government cannot go bankrupt.

(Note that of course, hypothetically, the US$ as a currency could be rejected by the US citizens, in which case the government would still be solvent, it just couldn't buy anything with its US$. However, then we're talking about what causes hyperinflation, and some insight into that can be found here)

The only possibility has ever been that the government voluntarily defaults (in the current case, due to the craziness of the Tea Party types).

Re:Modern Monetary Theory

[Mindcontrolled]

Agreed. That is basically my point - defaults being voluntary. Bringing up the debt/deficit ratio was meant to convey the notion that at some point of this curve, the voluntary default might become viable. Bringing the default on by obstruction is plain irrational, brought up by the deep wish of sheer destruction of the government.

Productivity doesn't just dissapear either

[Kyont]

What I wonder is whether bad economic times are good for open-source software development. Seems to me when there are a bunch of unemployed technical types around, they'd have more time to devote to working on the software, which could have lasting economic benefits all around. At least, I think that's what I'd try to work on if I lost my job. Being employed in other areas full time, I'm just a user, not a contributor to the continuous improvement of available software. Am I just being idealistic?

Re: Productivity doesn't just dissapear either

[erice]

Funny thing, "time off" while unemployed tends to be rather unproductive. It is difficult to commit to anything because there's no guessing how long you have. Job hunting itself is also an unpredictable impulsive afair that largely requires one to drop everything to follow up on a hot opportunity. That is, when it is not brain sucking unsolvable problem that drains one's ability to focus on other things.

I think bad economic times are actually bad for open-source development. People secure in their jobs can afford to slack a little and spend time on hobbies. Many companies also pay thier employees to contriute to open-source software. When budgets are tight, corporate efforts tend to smaller in scale and more foccused on the immediately needs of the company.

Re: Productivity doesn't just dissapear either

[Anonymous Coward]

Being unemployed is a full time job.

All I can say is

[rsilvergun]

It's good for me. My plugin for downloading flash video & converting to MP3 gets a lot more attention because it's free. It's a nice little boost to my ego & programming skills. I fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of enhancements I wouldn't have known about w/o the community I have now.

As a business owner...

[DogDude]

I can say, "no". As other people have stated, license fees are a drop in the bucket when compared to implementation costs. Money is tight. The *last* thing I would do right now is to disrupt my IT architecture in the hopes of saving a tiny fraction of my IT budget in license fees for proprietary software that is already in place and working.

Companies will use obsolete software instead

[Billly Gates]

Witness IE 6 and XP and need I say more? Even migrating to an opensource system costs money. You need extra hardware and redundancy ... you don't expect to just pull the plug in a mission critical system, reformat it with a new OS and software and plug it back in right? Not happening.

If money is tight you simply do not upgrade and run the older software. This creates a cycle as the accountants and analysts notice the cost savings and like it. Now the argument is why these 1999 system is fine? Why risk and waste money etc?

Bad times are bad for everyone who uses proprietary are free products. Companies only upgrade during expansions anyway and guess what? If manufactoring is cutting bank thanks to a double dip no one in their right mind will expand and those that are are putting them on hold.

The opposite is true

[Anonymous Coward]

Software licensing is a drop in the bucket in most IT shops. In tough times companies will likely run off the shelf software as the cost of labor to maintain is percieved to be less.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Big free software projects (not handy utilities that don't require much maintenance, but big programs/OS's that aren't classified as "research" or "experimental") get contributions in the form of code and financial support for developers. They do it because it is of benefit to them, but when the economy is in the lurch money is tight, and so the support dries up. Anyone who watches the progress and goals of major projects can see what happens in a recession.

Unless you're a design firm

[tepples]

you still have to pay retraining costs for anyone else who works for you.

You have to pay training costs for everyone anyway because people outside the company won't be familiar with your in-house applications.

Most designers seem to prefer mac really

Unless you're a design firm, you can probably just get Macs for the designers and give everyone else Linux.

Fernhout's Corollary to Banks' Money Observation

[Paul Fernhout]

"Velocity of money? No, it's about velocity of knowledge, freedom of the market, lower friction, and overall more wealth."

From: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/e4638f0fdd9f7ef1?hl=en

Banks' Observation on Money: "Money is a sign of poverty."

Fernhout's Corollary to Banks' Observation on Money: "The degree to which money needs to be handled in a society is inversely proportional to the abundance of imagination, skill, freedom, effort, and community present."

And mathematically:
      M = 1 / I * S * F * E * C

Who trained them on Windows in the first place?

[tepples]

At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users.

For one thing, who trained them on Windows in the first place?

For another, at my last job, I led a partial transition of functionality from a commercial off-the-shelf VBA application running on Microsoft Access and SQL Server Express to internal web applications running on LAMP. After that point, half the desktops ended up running Ubuntu, and we could hire more temps with no need for more Windows licenses. Users of web apps under Firefox for Windows needed little retraining to become productive in the same web apps under Firefox for Ubuntu.

A basic income is an alternative to make-work

[Paul Fernhout]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee

Lots of other suggestions cole ted by me here:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

We need free software about alternative economics!

[Paul Fernhout]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2356864&cid=36936914

I've been trying to get Richard Stallman and the FSF to consider supporting a campaign (suggesting maybe run by me for pay, so I'm biased, but OK if it was someone else) for fostering the cataloging, creation, and discussion of free software that explores conventional and alternative heterodox economics for a 21st century of abundance for all, based on this appeal:
        http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/ [responsiblefinance.ch]
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

Money moves to the casino economy

[Paul Fernhout]

To agree with your broad point: http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
See the "Money as Debt II - Promises Unleashed" video. Related except:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s

It seems to me that once money has moved to the casino economy (like currency speculation), it is no longer available for use in the real economy. This could cause a currency crisis in the real economy, even though the total amount of currency in the system might be huge.

Robotics are going to have the same effect of a concentration of wealth, according to Marshall Brain.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Alternatives...

[Paul Fernhout]

Interesting analysis by the numbers thanks.

Still, it is also true the cost of some commodities has declined during that time, too. Computing has dropped during that time. So has the cost of housing (good for some, bad for others). And probably the cost of employing labor has dipped a bit (which is both good and bad). The relative premium for some organic food items may be declining.

Solar panel prices have dropped in half, which has huge implications, as GE predicts by 2015 they will be cheaper to use than fossil fuels. That cheap clean energy will in turn eventually drive down other prices (see Julian Simon also).

Are there any other commodities that have gone down in cost during that time?

Quality for some things have also improved. Car quality has improved during that time for the same cost. Medicine has improved some. The internet has gotten better (more content, more choices). Mobile phones are way better for the same price in terms of features. It is hard to capture that in simple numbers.

Some of those commodity rises are also due to the rise of consumption in China.

Still, overall, I tend to agree with your economic pessimism. Our scarcity-oriented economic system built around an income-through-jobs link is unable to handle 21st century trends (especially from the rise of robotics and AI, coupled with limited demand like due to environmentalism).

On alternative economic approaches (by me):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Re:Alternatives...

[roman_mir]

Computer market is a much freer market from government regulations, than most other markets, so the prices there are falling, while quality is increasing, but imagine where the prices and quality would be if there was no government destroying the value of money and regulating away.

Houses are not a commodity in any way, they are expense, they should not be seeing as investment, unless they generate income (rental properties and such). Houses are assets of-course, but they are also liability, if there is a mortgage there. All aside, the government's policy of 1-0% interest and money printing and FHA/Freddie/Fannie policy of insuring bad debt caused massive asset inflation, the bubble burst in 2008, of-course this was predicted way before 2008 (see my sig.) and housing prices must come down more in real terms, though in nominal terms they may stay where they are or even go up a little, but in relation to their nominal term values, everything else is rising in price, so in real terms house prices must come down, and that's again, a good thing for the market, a necessary thing.

Labor costs are much overpriced in USA, this is connected to the labor regulations, taxes, subsidies, so no surprise US and most of the rest of Western world is losing jobs, because all of the regulations and inflation and taxes are causing capital flight.

Food prices are going up in dollars, that's what created the instability in the world, all the revolutions in the Middle East, the huge inflation in China, that will eventually force them to rethink subsidies they are providing to the West.

Solar panels are government subsidized, this has nothing to do with the market.

Cars, medications, telecommunications, all of this is pushed up in price and costs by government money and regulations. FDA, FCC, Medicare, Medicaid and all the other government departments and initiatives, they are causing massive price hikes everywhere, where in fact prices would have been falling steadily for the last 50 years. This includes education prices. The government causes massive monetary transfer via the consumers (debtors) from the government to all these companies, that get these funds. The students, sick people, consumers of telecommunications, they are all pawns in this massive wealth transfer game. The monopolies are subsidized and protected by the government. Obviously GM and Chrysler are directly bailed out an put on the shoulders of the public.

Chinese consumption is not causing price hikes, Chinese consumption causes price to decrease, as any new consumption in China is immediately offset by new production. You see, in productive societies the signals that the market sends in response to any new consumption immediately causes new production to take place and satisfy the demand, that's because in productive societies real money can be made satisfying the demand.

I am not pessimistic on all economies, I am just pessimistic on the short term future of socialized economies of US and Europe.

Re:Alternatives...

[Paul Fernhout]

Thanks for the reply. I still think the situation is more complex than you outlined, and you are stuck in just viewing this through one lens of "regulation is bad". But what about managing "Externalities" through taxes, subsidies, and regulation?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

See also (though it ignores the value of health and community):
    "Marxism of the Right"
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."

You think China and Japan and so on are less "socialistic" than the USA?

Neoliberal economics has kept real wages flat for thirty years in the USA, which is part of the reason for the current economic crisis. Related:
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Jix4opZuY

Also, the US government would have plenty of money without two (or is it five?) recent needless wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealth.

All sorts of technologies have been subsidized in the past. Railroads were heavily subsidized, for example.

If you look at solar panels, costs are now dropping for the same reasons your computer chip costs are dropping, a lot of R&D and investment in that area. There is now, according to one report I read, as much research going into PV solar in two years as the entire amount invested in research on it since it was invented. There is a chart of falling prices here:
    http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

That price decrease has little to do with government subsidies (other than pump-priming, to offset all the subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear, given externalities of those have been generally ignored and "socialized".)

The bottom line: the USA is falling apart because Republicans make the worst socialists -- they privatize gains while socializing costs. Real socialist countries don't do that. That is why Western Europe, in general, is a much happier place than the USA for most people, and most people live longer there. As is Canada. Unfortunately, people can not flow over borders as easily as capital, otherwise much of the USA might just move somewhere with access to health care, cheap college, and so on (those who don't watch Fox News. :-) Though with that said, and it is joking obviously, since cultural ties and family ties keep most people rooted where they are short of a shooting civil war or other broad physical disaster, there are still many good things about US culture, like freedom of speech, which can still be better than in some other countries. But it seems the list of things better about the USA than other countries is getting shorter and shorter.

However, on top of that, there are broad trends from the centralization of wealth due to the increasing value of capital in production relative to human labor, which indeed undermines the paid value of most human labor (and not just in the USA, but eventually everywhere, which is why we will eventually see a new economic system for the 21st century with stuff like a basic income, a gift economy, better planning, and more advanced local subsistence production):
    http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Why not outsource non-essentials like that?

[Idou]

Really, only those with core competencies to the key business applications (including the core applications) should be full-time, IHMO. Of course, it would depend on the start-up. . .

Nothing can beat Microsoft at the desktop, nothing

[emailandthings]

Nothing can beat Microsoft at the desktop simply because the mindset of how to use a PC means Windows. You can cheer about how you install it on grandma's but for every installation, there are other 10 new shinny Windows 7 installations being sold. Linux desktop is a fun dream to toy around with just like those who tweak their cars...

Sadly the only "Unix" challenge to a Windows desktop is the MacOS.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucks disgust me. The consequences of defaulting on the national debt are terribly bad, but you're all here jacking off about how it would be great because people would start using Linux.

Get some fucking priorities assholes. We're talking about people's futures here, not some stupid fucking software holy war.

More importantly

[vga_init]

Are free economic times good for bad software?

I would say no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Economics is one of the poorest reasons to switch to Free Software. The cost of the license is the most pithy reason. Its another notch in the cap sure, but the poorest one. Not having the BSA shake your company down for millions is a better reason. Having control over your companies software stack is another, eg: if your software provider decides that a bug in their software that is stifling your business isn't economical enough (to them) to fix, then suck it up.... with Open Source software you can at least look at the source, and even if its all meaningless to you, you can hire someone to fix it. If the software is also Free (as in freedom), then you can ship it (you still have to comply with the GPL) but you can ship it to customers (they have to comply with the GPL too). If a vendor wishes to discontinue a product, and pull all their licenses, you build your kingdom on it, then you have to hope their new stuff will work with your stuff. With a license that gives you more liberty, you don't have to upgrade or change if you don't want to. Also with a proprietary vendor, if they don't provide good service, they can say 'go pound sand' and thats that. Even if you have a paid up contract with them, you can't sue because the software is still theirs, not yours (licensed, not sold). If you have a problem they can't or won't fix, you can try and sue, and they will give you your money back (and your problem still exists). With Open Source software, you can hire people left and right, to fix your stuff. You always have more options. Free Software means Free Market.

for the last time, repeat after me

[smash]

.. the cost of a software license pales in comparison to the cost of switching due to (in no particular order): certifying your mission critical apps, lost time due to reinstalling the OS on every PC you have, dealing with 2 different environments if you don't, re-training users and dealing with general fall-out. Never mind the associated risks with getting halfway through the change to find some showstopper, or paying for the employee time to attempt to pre-empt these before starting.

Bad economy = maintain status quo. NOT go for high-risk/potentially high return change.

horrendous application names

[Anonymous Coward]

#5 - I agree w/ the GP. You seem to have customized the names, which is fine, but the very names of these packages are strange. Contrast it w/ iPAD for instance, where Numbers are the spreadsheet, Book is the book reading software and so on. Yeah, Linux has quite a collection of media players, which generally get bunched into one menu, but even then, names like VLC, Kaffeine don't say much (although KPlayer and KMPlayer are slightly better). Who would guess that Karbon14 means scalable graphics - one would associate it w/ radioactive dating. Or that Kopete is instant messenger?

And most K apps are at least better in their naming schemes. Who would think that Tomboy is a note taking application? Or that Cheese is a webcam app? Or that banshee is a media player? I'm happy for the developers that they get to name these babies of theirs, but the ones they choose leave their 'customers' w/ no clue as to what they are, until they look closely. GIMP is at least one of the good ones, in that it is the initials of GNU Image Manipulation Program.

No Timmy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid not. Bad economic times are not good for anyone or anything who is capable of higher reason

I hate these thousands comments

[luk3Z]

I hate these thousands comments about what is better linux or windows.

"clean hands = not real work" fallacy?

[Hognoxious]

And even when they do it's only insomuch as they allow other workers to create more goods by freeing up time that they would have to spend performing those duties themselves.

You think that effect is trivial? To just pick one obvious example - teaching is a service job. Imagine how it would be if the majority of people couldn't read and write[1].

Seems like you've fallen for the "clean hands = not real work" fallacy.

[1] //to do: insert joke about slashdot/twitter/Indians/rednecks

Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing a company needs is to spend money on re-training staff on how to use their computer and recreating their internal systems to be Linux compatible. No 2011 will not be the "Year of the Linux Desktop".

Impossible.

[TheRedApple]

The least money people have, the least risk they want to take. Even if open source is a "risk free area" it is still unknown territory for most people at thus making it a potential risk. Some people go basejumping, others try distros ...

Ribbon schmibbon already

[Hognoxious]

The cost of a license for your workers is a rounding error. The cost of training people to use something that isn't Office isn't.

By a bizzare coincidence, training people to use version o+n (where o is the version they're used to and n is any positive integer) is precisely not a rounding error too.

Though you miss the meat in his post: if people are sitting round with nothing to do, then getting them to spend a few hours here and there playing around with something costs nothing.

hello

[Anonymous Coward]

kgdv usyrseujgstsehiutsjedghguyjtrv uytrwec

MTECH COMPUTER