Mozilla does this in the latest versions (login popup) but it doesn't help in many situations. I need to log out of my session and relogin to my machine so Mozilla's using a different profile, and shows a different list of usernames to use. I don't want anyone who can walk up to that machine to be able to use my username/password on multiple websites.
Sure, M$ is stuffing all of this in one "easy to get" system, but quite honestly, anyone who needs all/many of these things on a regular basis already has a method of getting what they need worked out. M$ is (once again) innovating nothing
Who said they were innovating? If anything, it IS an innovation to make things "easy to get". Classic "linux v MS" arguments always focus on Linux advocates saying "yeah, but you can do everything under Linux already!" when in fact usually it's a pain in the ass to do most of what accomplished quite easily under Windows. This is changing, but they are still not equal systems in terms of "ease of use". So, if the ONLY thing MS "innovates" is "easy to get" systems, it'll still succeed, because many other people seem to be vehemently AGAINST making things easy, for some unknown reason. It usually seems to boil down to ego - "if you're too stupid to use Linux, etc".
"clean, well-made software" doesn't necessarily imply 'small' or 'tiny', which is what that site is supposed to be about. Honestly, I don't find that many Linux apps that are terribly small, only because I end up getting a ton of source code which I need to compile. The resulting binaries are sometimes small/tiny, but those generally aren't distributed - you get ALL the source, even if you only need a fraction of the options.
Re:Argument: Free ($$) software stops the little g
on
Opposing Open Source?
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· Score: 2
You're kinda right, but...
It's not that the product has to be better than gcc - it's gotta be WHOLE LOTS better. Orders of magnitude better. Because something like gcc is on every distro, and is so entrenched, that it'll take a LOT of work to displace it. Even if some of the feature set is better in a new product, people have learned to live with the issues gcc has that are solved by the new product. This is similar to the MS issue on the desktop. Doesn't matter if Linux is even free and still 'better' (when it gets there). MS is preinstalled on 90%+ of machines. OK, it crashes sometimes. Can't do feature X, etc. But people learn to live with/work around those issues. So much so that even if/when something somewhat better comes along, it'll be damned near impossible to unseat the contender.
"Dont give me this "you can pay more money if you want" because you know no one ever does this. Not in this world. People have to be forced to pay more".
Tell that to the Red Cross - how many millions did they receive because people wanted to help? When people know where their money is going, and there's a genuine need, people give in DROVES. Just through Amazon's site there was something like $10 million collected for the Red Cross. People don't have to be forced into ANYTHING.
I replied to you in another thread, but you have popped up here as well.
Do you know what the U.S. government taxes? If you say 'money', 'wealth' or 'income', you're wrong.
The U.S. government taxes *activity*. I buy something from you, the *transaction* is taxed. If you go stuff that money in your mattress and don't touch it for 10 years, it's effectively out of circulation. The moment you use it to buy anything, that *transaction* is taxed.
If people have less money because the IRS is taking it, they have less money to create transactions with. The fewer transactions there are, the less revenue the government has.
It's pretty basic, really. If the government takes more money, short term (1 year? 2 years?) it'll have "more" money, but people will be able to create fewer transactions, leading to less tax revenue.
First things first. We're not at war. Countries that have truly been at war (US years ago, Europe years ago, etc) were at war - this is little more than an exercise right now. Yes we were attacked, but we're not at war.
Second - 'no medicine'? Every case on anthrax detected has been treated (except for one and I think that was more due to timing than availability of medicine). We're prepared as we can be short of everyone stopping their lives. People who claim otherwise have other agendas - such as gaining more control over our everyday lives and/or money.
As someone else pointed out, there's nothing stopping you from paying more in taxes. I'm sure you could simply send an extra check every few weeks to the IRS "just because" and they'll be happy to cash it.
*IF* one could specify where this extra money would be spent, I'm sure some people might be inclined to do this. However, it all goes in one big pot, and gets spent on everything - porkbarrel projects, etc. PERHAPS, if the government trimmed it's spending more, there'd be more money to pay for this 'defense' which you claim we don't have. I think we're spending something like $200 *billion* dollars a year already on 'defense', but apparently we aren't. You must know something we don't know.
If everyone who's calling for 'raising' taxes or 'reversing the tax cut' would simply pay more, I'm sure that would make SOME impact. Honestly. It seems there are a substantial number of people who feel this way. If there's only a hundred thousand around the country who feel this way, and each one of them sent in $100 to the IRS next week, that's $10 MILLION dollars. Use that to help 'defend' things. Wow. $10 mil would actually get something done somewhere.
Come on HanzoSan - get moving! Perhaps you could use that money to run TV adverts to convince everyone else to push congress to raise taxes. That's probably the most effective use. No, wait - the networks should simply donate air time to such a worthy cause (some would argue they already have!).
But seriously - you should be able to rally 100,000 people via the web to pay an extra $100 in taxes to the IRS in one month. Think of what that $10 million would buy. Why, you could even fund a tech company with it...
How is this different from the 'mail order' tax? Perhaps Ohio and others are different - in Michigan you're supposed to report the value of anything purchased on which you didn't pay a sales tax (mail order, etc.), calculate the tax on that, then pay it.
This still doesn't seem that impressive. I mean, the SIZE of it is, but it doesn't really 'prove' Perl (or anything else) is 'scaleable'. The design approach is scaleable, with enough money.
If they really were doing 2 million page views per hour, that's about 600 page views per second. Across even JUST the 40 'dynamic page builder' servers, that's 15 pages/second. If you include the reported 20 static page servers, you get 600/60 = 10 pages per second. Certainly nowhere near taxing on a dual P450, ime.
What this really points out is that people need to spend more time engineering solutions rather than buying 'scaleable enterprise fill-in-the-blank' for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again, just mho.:)
I'm a bit late here, but I can't see how many 'nodes' they have. 7000 - 20000 orders per hour, or whatever other stats they throw up, just isn't impressive unless I know how many machines (and their power) handle that. 5-10? Probably impressive. 100? Probably not. Anyone got any more info?
My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS
I don't think they CAN make it completely unusable with previous versions of SMB or else no previous Windows products could work with it either, unless you're forced to download a new networking patch for EVERY Windows PC on your network. Course, if it was installed via the next IE update, then it might work...
If previous Windows clients can't talk to the new stuff, people will think VERY long about upgrading and having to throw away all the current investment.
A bit late to the party, but these comments have 'gotten my goat' so to speak.
The majority of comments I hear from opensource/Linux people is 'choice is good', 'no choice is bad', 'I choose to do things in manner X', etc. However, having those choices in WM front ends apparently is NOT a good thing. Apparently we need just 'one' way of doing something (actually, I'm not all that opposed, if everyone would just write to that standard instead of bitching about it).
But... here we have an OS which is accused of being monolithic (Windows) yet it's also being criticized because there's more than one way to launch a program? So - if they lock you in to one method - it's bad. If you have choice - it's bad. Is this only because it's MS?
Well, actually I do, but I don't use it exclusively. There are things better done in Windows than Linux, and vice versa - at least when you have a budget to work within.:)
Others have said it in the past, and I'm starting to believe it more myself. I really think that many at large companies use default installs of Office as job security. No one can blame them entirely if there's a problem - after all, the IT guys themselves didn't write the viruses. Failing to keep up with patches released months earlier can be cause for problems, but if a virus just came out recently, or there's just no patch for it, then "It's not my fault!" is a very valid point.
The 'job security' aspect comes in because *someone* has to go around and patch every machine. *Someone* has to go round and install/test new virus software. I think it's past being 'common knowledge' that *by default* most MS products install themselves pretty insecurely. So someone has to learn about how to lock down those products - then actually do it. It's job security, choosing products which you KNOW will require you to always be updating them.
Yeah, I'm a bit overly cynical about this. I've met some people who really just think this is how computers are supposed to be - you're always playing 'catch up' to virus writers. The concept of prevention to them is installing the latest 'Norton' utility. Proactively analyzing the systems they have for potential vulnerabilities (turn off scripting on machines that don't need it, etc) just doesn't occur to them.
I'll be the first to admit that StarOffice/OpenOffice have not been up to snuff in the past, and even the current versions may not be up to snuff for everyone, but they're getting better. SO6 and the next OO may in fact be solid enough to let *many* in an organization use those as their primary or only Office applications, and let the few people that need the MS-specific features keep using MS Office. Yes, there'd be some relearning costs - figure that gets covered by the savings in upgrade licensing for those people.
It also doesn't help that some shops are too cheap to shell out $300 for the W2K Resource Kit or a TechNet Subscription. Then maybe people would also stop complaining about the lack of MS documentation.
"Too cheap"?!? They've had to spend for NT (4 or 5) in the first place! Maybe it's MS who is too cheap to include basic admin tools with their 'server' products in the first place.
As someone else pointed out, TCO becomes more of an issue. Why the hell should I have to pay $300 for the privilege of being able to run 'kill.exe' to stop runaway processes (which seem to happen to me more under Windows than other systems).
Haven't checked 2000 so it MAY be part of that, but for YEARS, every time I used NT4, I had to go find the stupid resource kit to get kill.exe and other 'bonus' admin tools.
So on top of the $1000+ for the OS, I need to spend hundreds extra to stop runaway processes caused by a faulty OS in the first place.
Wow - this is probably the first time I've seen 100+ comments about a Linux distro release with fewer than 10 (what I could see) "Debian rules/apt-get kicks ass/blah blah" posts. Maybe they're all just modded way down, but I don't think so. Maybe they're too busy trying Mandrake 8.1?:)
Perhaps we should pass a law specifically against crashing airplanes into buildings. As far as I know there isn't a law *specifically* against this, and we all know that *everyone* follows every law all the time. We probably need both a federal statute and numerous state and local ordinances to let would-be terrorists know we're serious.
"You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography."
It seems these argeements tend to get more sweeping. I can understand them actually saying 'don't use our products to disparage us'. Whether or not that's legal or binding, it's understandable.
But "hatred"? That's such a broad term that I'm rather surprised a legal let it in. How do you define hatred? Or rather, where does the definition stop? Many people agree on certain actions being 'hateful' or based on hatred, but others wouldn't be so clear cut. Anti-abortion sites might be considered 'hate' sites by some people- can they not use front page? Hatred (and porn) is in the eye of the beholder oftentimes, so how can a person USING the software determine how OTHERS will classify their use of the product?
Correct. If they came out and said "damn - we intercepted 10 emails on Friday, but it took us until Tuesday afternoon to decrypt them" they'd at least have a point. No one has said anything about "we got communications we couldn't decrypt" so the whole "ban encryption" issue is pointless. IMO of course.:)
Re:Upgrading...
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
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· Score: 3, Interesting
hell, why not come up with a meta-package that will package the RPMs together into one Downloadable fiel that you know will include all the dependancies needed?
Cause then it would "be too much like Windows"(tm). May Linux developers seem to be hell-bent on avoiding even the tiniest hint of 'ease' when it comes to installing their packages (let alone using them). This is not a dig at the KDE folks per se, just my experiences in general. I've had IRC conversations trying to get answers to installation questions where the answer - on more than one occasion - was "if you just want to install something and use it - just go use Windows". The scary thing was they thought that was an insult.
Personally I've never been able to find good HTTP sources for MandrakeUpdate - they're all in France and take megs just to update the packages they have, then inevitably they are versions behind in something I'm looking for. Anyone know of any good HTTP sources for MandrakeUpdate?
What is also a problem, is the fact that free software yields incredible consumer surpluses, but very little in terms of company profits. Since the government needs companies to make profits, so that they can levy taxes, they will not encourage free software.
Damn, this is pretty shortsighted thinking. Does it not seem that companies that have more money can either SPEND IT ON OTHER THINGS BESIDES SOFTWARE LICENSING or PAY THEIR EMPLOYEES MORE or HIRE MORE PEOPLE? Less money on licensing (using more open source stuff) means more money leftover to spend on other things - tangible goods that help manufacturing and distribution companies - companies that hire REAL PEOPLE.
The government doesn't tax profits (well, yes they do). Primarily, what the government taxes is TRANSACTIONS. Me holding on to 1000 dollars does NO good in terms of taxation. Me SPENDING 1000 dollars in various places incurs a sales tax on every transaction.
Maybe more companies would make more profits if they didn't SPEND so much on closed source, proprietary software.
To turn your argument around: Big deal if a few OS companies don't make much profit on their software - if thousands of other companies can realize PROFIT faster because of reduced costs, that means MORE taxes from those profits.
Again, I don't subscribe to the notion that taxing profits is that big a revenue stream for governments. It's transactions that count.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla does this in the latest versions (login popup) but it doesn't help in many situations. I need to log out of my session and relogin to my machine so Mozilla's using a different profile, and shows a different list of usernames to use. I don't want anyone who can walk up to that machine to be able to use my username/password on multiple websites.
Sure, M$ is stuffing all of this in one "easy to get" system, but quite honestly, anyone who needs all/many of these things on a regular basis already has a method of getting what they need worked out. M$ is (once again) innovating nothing
Who said they were innovating? If anything, it IS an innovation to make things "easy to get". Classic "linux v MS" arguments always focus on Linux advocates saying "yeah, but you can do everything under Linux already!" when in fact usually it's a pain in the ass to do most of what accomplished quite easily under Windows. This is changing, but they are still not equal systems in terms of "ease of use". So, if the ONLY thing MS "innovates" is "easy to get" systems, it'll still succeed, because many other people seem to be vehemently AGAINST making things easy, for some unknown reason. It usually seems to boil down to ego - "if you're too stupid to use Linux, etc".
"...perhaps they should have made it more intuitive, dev-freindly, and included better documentation"
I think the costs they were referring to were bandwidth costs, not other costs like documentation and support.
"clean, well-made software" doesn't necessarily imply 'small' or 'tiny', which is what that site is supposed to be about. Honestly, I don't find that many Linux apps that are terribly small, only because I end up getting a ton of source code which I need to compile. The resulting binaries are sometimes small/tiny, but those generally aren't distributed - you get ALL the source, even if you only need a fraction of the options.
You're kinda right, but...
It's not that the product has to be better than gcc - it's gotta be WHOLE LOTS better. Orders of magnitude better. Because something like gcc is on every distro, and is so entrenched, that it'll take a LOT of work to displace it. Even if some of the feature set is better in a new product, people have learned to live with the issues gcc has that are solved by the new product. This is similar to the MS issue on the desktop. Doesn't matter if Linux is even free and still 'better' (when it gets there). MS is preinstalled on 90%+ of machines. OK, it crashes sometimes. Can't do feature X, etc. But people learn to live with/work around those issues. So much so that even if/when something somewhat better comes along, it'll be damned near impossible to unseat the contender.
"Dont give me this "you can pay more money if you want" because you know no one ever does this. Not in this world. People have to be forced to pay more".
Tell that to the Red Cross - how many millions did they receive because people wanted to help? When people know where their money is going, and there's a genuine need, people give in DROVES. Just through Amazon's site there was something like $10 million collected for the Red Cross. People don't have to be forced into ANYTHING.
I replied to you in another thread, but you have popped up here as well.
Do you know what the U.S. government taxes? If you say 'money', 'wealth' or 'income', you're wrong.
The U.S. government taxes *activity*. I buy something from you, the *transaction* is taxed. If you go stuff that money in your mattress and don't touch it for 10 years, it's effectively out of circulation. The moment you use it to buy anything, that *transaction* is taxed.
If people have less money because the IRS is taking it, they have less money to create transactions with. The fewer transactions there are, the less revenue the government has.
It's pretty basic, really. If the government takes more money, short term (1 year? 2 years?) it'll have "more" money, but people will be able to create fewer transactions, leading to less tax revenue.
First things first. We're not at war. Countries that have truly been at war (US years ago, Europe years ago, etc) were at war - this is little more than an exercise right now. Yes we were attacked, but we're not at war.
Second - 'no medicine'? Every case on anthrax detected has been treated (except for one and I think that was more due to timing than availability of medicine). We're prepared as we can be short of everyone stopping their lives. People who claim otherwise have other agendas - such as gaining more control over our everyday lives and/or money.
As someone else pointed out, there's nothing stopping you from paying more in taxes. I'm sure you could simply send an extra check every few weeks to the IRS "just because" and they'll be happy to cash it.
*IF* one could specify where this extra money would be spent, I'm sure some people might be inclined to do this. However, it all goes in one big pot, and gets spent on everything - porkbarrel projects, etc. PERHAPS, if the government trimmed it's spending more, there'd be more money to pay for this 'defense' which you claim we don't have. I think we're spending something like $200 *billion* dollars a year already on 'defense', but apparently we aren't. You must know something we don't know.
If everyone who's calling for 'raising' taxes or 'reversing the tax cut' would simply pay more, I'm sure that would make SOME impact. Honestly. It seems there are a substantial number of people who feel this way. If there's only a hundred thousand around the country who feel this way, and each one of them sent in $100 to the IRS next week, that's $10 MILLION dollars. Use that to help 'defend' things. Wow. $10 mil would actually get something done somewhere.
Come on HanzoSan - get moving! Perhaps you could use that money to run TV adverts to convince everyone else to push congress to raise taxes. That's probably the most effective use. No, wait - the networks should simply donate air time to such a worthy cause (some would argue they already have!).
But seriously - you should be able to rally 100,000 people via the web to pay an extra $100 in taxes to the IRS in one month. Think of what that $10 million would buy. Why, you could even fund a tech company with it...
How is this different from the 'mail order' tax? Perhaps Ohio and others are different - in Michigan you're supposed to report the value of anything purchased on which you didn't pay a sales tax (mail order, etc.), calculate the tax on that, then pay it.
People don't go back to GM 3 months after buying a car and ask - nay, demand - for the steering wheel to be moved either.
This still doesn't seem that impressive. I mean, the SIZE of it is, but it doesn't really 'prove' Perl (or anything else) is 'scaleable'. The design approach is scaleable, with enough money.
:)
If they really were doing 2 million page views per hour, that's about 600 page views per second. Across even JUST the 40 'dynamic page builder' servers, that's 15 pages/second. If you include the reported 20 static page servers, you get 600/60 = 10 pages per second. Certainly nowhere near taxing on a dual P450, ime.
What this really points out is that people need to spend more time engineering solutions rather than buying 'scaleable enterprise fill-in-the-blank' for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again, just mho.
I'm a bit late here, but I can't see how many 'nodes' they have. 7000 - 20000 orders per hour, or whatever other stats they throw up, just isn't impressive unless I know how many machines (and their power) handle that. 5-10? Probably impressive. 100? Probably not. Anyone got any more info?
Damn it - I logged in, but it still took these as AC comments... :(
My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS
I don't think they CAN make it completely unusable with previous versions of SMB or else no previous Windows products could work with it either, unless you're forced to download a new networking patch for EVERY Windows PC on your network. Course, if it was installed via the next IE update, then it might work...
If previous Windows clients can't talk to the new stuff, people will think VERY long about upgrading and having to throw away all the current investment.
A bit late to the party, but these comments have 'gotten my goat' so to speak.
The majority of comments I hear from opensource/Linux people is 'choice is good', 'no choice is bad', 'I choose to do things in manner X', etc. However, having those choices in WM front ends apparently is NOT a good thing. Apparently we need just 'one' way of doing something (actually, I'm not all that opposed, if everyone would just write to that standard instead of bitching about it).
But... here we have an OS which is accused of being monolithic (Windows) yet it's also being criticized because there's more than one way to launch a program? So - if they lock you in to one method - it's bad. If you have choice - it's bad. Is this only because it's MS?
Well, actually I do, but I don't use it exclusively. There are things better done in Windows than Linux, and vice versa - at least when you have a budget to work within. :)
Others have said it in the past, and I'm starting to believe it more myself. I really think that many at large companies use default installs of Office as job security. No one can blame them entirely if there's a problem - after all, the IT guys themselves didn't write the viruses. Failing to keep up with patches released months earlier can be cause for problems, but if a virus just came out recently, or there's just no patch for it, then "It's not my fault!" is a very valid point.
The 'job security' aspect comes in because *someone* has to go around and patch every machine. *Someone* has to go round and install/test new virus software. I think it's past being 'common knowledge' that *by default* most MS products install themselves pretty insecurely. So someone has to learn about how to lock down those products - then actually do it. It's job security, choosing products which you KNOW will require you to always be updating them.
Yeah, I'm a bit overly cynical about this. I've met some people who really just think this is how computers are supposed to be - you're always playing 'catch up' to virus writers. The concept of prevention to them is installing the latest 'Norton' utility. Proactively analyzing the systems they have for potential vulnerabilities (turn off scripting on machines that don't need it, etc) just doesn't occur to them.
I'll be the first to admit that StarOffice/OpenOffice have not been up to snuff in the past, and even the current versions may not be up to snuff for everyone, but they're getting better. SO6 and the next OO may in fact be solid enough to let *many* in an organization use those as their primary or only Office applications, and let the few people that need the MS-specific features keep using MS Office. Yes, there'd be some relearning costs - figure that gets covered by the savings in upgrade licensing for those people.
It also doesn't help that some shops are too cheap to shell out $300 for the W2K Resource Kit or a TechNet Subscription. Then maybe people would also stop complaining about the lack of MS documentation.
"Too cheap"?!? They've had to spend for NT (4 or 5) in the first place! Maybe it's MS who is too cheap to include basic admin tools with their 'server' products in the first place.
As someone else pointed out, TCO becomes more of an issue. Why the hell should I have to pay $300 for the privilege of being able to run 'kill.exe' to stop runaway processes (which seem to happen to me more under Windows than other systems).
Haven't checked 2000 so it MAY be part of that, but for YEARS, every time I used NT4, I had to go find the stupid resource kit to get kill.exe and other 'bonus' admin tools.
So on top of the $1000+ for the OS, I need to spend hundreds extra to stop runaway processes caused by a faulty OS in the first place.
TCO.
Wow - this is probably the first time I've seen 100+ comments about a Linux distro release with fewer than 10 (what I could see) "Debian rules/apt-get kicks ass/blah blah" posts. Maybe they're all just modded way down, but I don't think so. Maybe they're too busy trying Mandrake 8.1? :)
Perhaps we should pass a law specifically against crashing airplanes into buildings. As far as I know there isn't a law *specifically* against this, and we all know that *everyone* follows every law all the time. We probably need both a federal statute and numerous state and local ordinances to let would-be terrorists know we're serious.
"You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography."
It seems these argeements tend to get more sweeping. I can understand them actually saying 'don't use our products to disparage us'. Whether or not that's legal or binding, it's understandable.
But "hatred"? That's such a broad term that I'm rather surprised a legal let it in. How do you define hatred? Or rather, where does the definition stop? Many people agree on certain actions being 'hateful' or based on hatred, but others wouldn't be so clear cut. Anti-abortion sites might be considered 'hate' sites by some people- can they not use front page? Hatred (and porn) is in the eye of the beholder oftentimes, so how can a person USING the software determine how OTHERS will classify their use of the product?
Correct. If they came out and said "damn - we intercepted 10 emails on Friday, but it took us until Tuesday afternoon to decrypt them" they'd at least have a point. No one has said anything about "we got communications we couldn't decrypt" so the whole "ban encryption" issue is pointless. IMO of course. :)
hell, why not come up with a meta-package that will package the RPMs together into one Downloadable fiel that you know will include all the dependancies needed?
Cause then it would "be too much like Windows"(tm). May Linux developers seem to be hell-bent on avoiding even the tiniest hint of 'ease' when it comes to installing their packages (let alone using them). This is not a dig at the KDE folks per se, just my experiences in general. I've had IRC conversations trying to get answers to installation questions where the answer - on more than one occasion - was "if you just want to install something and use it - just go use Windows". The scary thing was they thought that was an insult.
Personally I've never been able to find good HTTP sources for MandrakeUpdate - they're all in France and take megs just to update the packages they have, then inevitably they are versions behind in something I'm looking for. Anyone know of any good HTTP sources for MandrakeUpdate?
What is also a problem, is the fact that free software yields incredible consumer surpluses, but very little in terms of company profits. Since the government needs companies to make profits, so that they can levy taxes, they will not encourage free software.
Damn, this is pretty shortsighted thinking. Does it not seem that companies that have more money can either SPEND IT ON OTHER THINGS BESIDES SOFTWARE LICENSING or PAY THEIR EMPLOYEES MORE or HIRE MORE PEOPLE? Less money on licensing (using more open source stuff) means more money leftover to spend on other things - tangible goods that help manufacturing and distribution companies - companies that hire REAL PEOPLE.
The government doesn't tax profits (well, yes they do). Primarily, what the government taxes is TRANSACTIONS. Me holding on to 1000 dollars does NO good in terms of taxation. Me SPENDING 1000 dollars in various places incurs a sales tax on every transaction.
Maybe more companies would make more profits if they didn't SPEND so much on closed source, proprietary software.
To turn your argument around: Big deal if a few OS companies don't make much profit on their software - if thousands of other companies can realize PROFIT faster because of reduced costs, that means MORE taxes from those profits.
Again, I don't subscribe to the notion that taxing profits is that big a revenue stream for governments. It's transactions that count.