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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.'"
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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.
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.
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...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.