I think you need to read some Keynesian economic theory. The fact is there are times when the spending of business and consumers collapse (for a wide variety of reasons). This situation can lead to a depression as the decline in spending is self re-enforcing, I.E. I spend less, you lose your job, you spend less and the next person loses their job. So, having the government at this time use it's credit to borrow can break this cycle just long enough to start a cycle in the reverse direction.
... Do you really think the consumer or BeOS will get a dime of this?...
Please, anti-trust law is only indirectly about protecting the consumer. Anti-trust law is about protecting the rights of other businesses to compete in a fair and open market. Protecting the consumer is only the hoped for outcome of protecting businesses against a monopoly. The EU is doing what the US government failed to do, which is to rein in the power of a company that was using its monopoly in two markets (desktop OS and desktop productivity software) to a) prevent competition in these markets and b) to allow them to expand into additional markets such as the server OS market.
I know that Novell has moved a good part of their work force over to either Suse or Novell Linux Desktop. I also know that the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in Detroit has 110 Linux terminals being used by students.
Only recently has society had an abundance of very wealthy people who have enough surplus time and money that they're willing to give it away for nothing.
No, it is not wealth that brought about free software it is the ability of the user to communicate (I.E. the Internet). Free software is out there because users can share their efforts and together produce something that is more then what they could produce on their own. Software is given away for free because the creator benefits from giving it away.
While I agree that 'open' may be the wrong name for a pdf, I believe that Adobe has release a free document that describes in detail the rules for the content of a pdf file... I do not believe that such a document has been released by Microsoft for their office products.
Actually we considered the educational validity of the conversion and that is one reason OpenOffice,org was the better choice. Most of our students arrive with MS Office experience and they believe that they know everything about how to use an office suite. By throwing OpenOffice at them we take them out of their comfort zones and force them to re-learn on our terms. In our courses we steer them away from rote memorization and instead teach the concepts that will allow them to be comfortable learning a variety of software in the future.
Clearly you missed the point of the Article... the question is not is OpenOffice.org better. The question is given the choice between spending $$$ on MS Office or using the open source alternative OpenOffice.org and saving the $$$ for other technology and non-technology (salary) needs which option would better serve the needs of our school? We at U of D Jesuit choose to use OpenOffice.org and save our $$$ for other purposes. Does every one of our users prefer OpenOffice.org to MS Office? Of course not, but neither does every member prefer MS Office. We are happy with our choice and recommend that others give OpenOffice.org consideration for the same reasons we did!
Your humble opinion has no basis in economic fact. The money not spent on WindowsXP doesn't disappear. It means lower taxes when a government uses open source and more dollars in the hands of the citizens. For a business it means larger profits...which the last time I looked was the goal of business. And again those profits can be re-invested or distributed to the stock holders. No matter how you paint it, from an economic standpoint, using Linux and not spending on Windows XP makes economic sense.
Really, only the functionality of Windows 3.1. I spent years using Windows 3.1 and 3.11, and the current Linux desktop, KDE or Gnome are far above Windows 3.1. In fact, if you stick to a single desktop and the software that comes with it the Linux desktop experience is easily comparible with the latest from Microsoft.
A curious perspective. They successfully created a PC/OS combination that allows them to run required 'Windows' applications and their mainline production applications which run on Unix. They run them all on a single PC, saving the cost of each working having two PC's. Having technology is great, successfully applying technology to meet your needs is "something special".
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I think you need to read some Keynesian economic theory. The fact is there are times when the spending of business and consumers collapse (for a wide variety of reasons). This situation can lead to a depression as the decline in spending is self re-enforcing, I.E. I spend less, you lose your job, you spend less and the next person loses their job. So, having the government at this time use it's credit to borrow can break this cycle just long enough to start a cycle in the reverse direction.
... Do you really think the consumer or BeOS will get a dime of this? ...
Please, anti-trust law is only indirectly about protecting the consumer. Anti-trust law is about protecting the rights of other businesses to compete in a fair and open market. Protecting the consumer is only the hoped for outcome of protecting businesses against a monopoly. The EU is doing what the US government failed to do, which is to rein in the power of a company that was using its monopoly in two markets (desktop OS and desktop productivity software) to a) prevent competition in these markets and b) to allow them to expand into additional markets such as the server OS market.
I know that Novell has moved a good part of their work force over to either Suse or Novell Linux Desktop. I also know that the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in Detroit has 110 Linux terminals being used by students.
Only recently has society had an abundance of very wealthy people who have enough surplus time and money that they're willing to give it away for nothing.
No, it is not wealth that brought about free software it is the ability of the user to communicate (I.E. the Internet). Free software is out there because users can share their efforts and together produce something that is more then what they could produce on their own. Software is given away for free because the creator benefits from giving it away.
While I agree that 'open' may be the wrong name for a pdf, I believe that Adobe has release a free document that describes in detail the rules for the content of a pdf file... I do not believe that such a document has been released by Microsoft for their office products.
Actually we considered the educational validity of the conversion and that is one reason OpenOffice,org was the better choice. Most of our students arrive with MS Office experience and they believe that they know everything about how to use an office suite. By throwing OpenOffice at them we take them out of their comfort zones and force them to re-learn on our terms. In our courses we steer them away from rote memorization and instead teach the concepts that will allow them to be comfortable learning a variety of software in the future.
Clearly you missed the point of the Article... the question is not is OpenOffice.org better. The question is given the choice between spending $$$ on MS Office or using the open source alternative OpenOffice.org and saving the $$$ for other technology and non-technology (salary) needs which option would better serve the needs of our school? We at U of D Jesuit choose to use OpenOffice.org and save our $$$ for other purposes. Does every one of our users prefer OpenOffice.org to MS Office? Of course not, but neither does every member prefer MS Office. We are happy with our choice and recommend that others give OpenOffice.org consideration for the same reasons we did!
Your humble opinion has no basis in economic fact. The money not spent on WindowsXP doesn't disappear. It means lower taxes when a government uses open source and more dollars in the hands of the citizens. For a business it means larger profits ...which the last time I looked was the goal of business. And again those profits can be re-invested or distributed to the stock holders. No matter how you paint it, from an economic standpoint, using Linux and not spending on Windows XP makes economic sense.
Really, only the functionality of Windows 3.1. I spent years using Windows 3.1 and 3.11, and the current Linux desktop, KDE or Gnome are far above Windows 3.1. In fact, if you stick to a single desktop and the software that comes with it the Linux desktop experience is easily comparible with the latest from Microsoft.
> Bottom line: They didn't do anything special.
A curious perspective. They successfully created a PC/OS combination that allows them to run required 'Windows' applications and their mainline production applications which run on Unix. They run them all on a single PC, saving the cost of each working having two PC's. Having technology is great, successfully applying technology to meet your needs is "something special".