"Revolution OS" (The Movie).

[Jerry Haltom]

That's all great and wow and stuff, but if Exchange was free, I'd use
it. And I wouldn't pay MS. That's obviously negative to their income.

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 18:56 +0000, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 12:22 -0600, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> > > Yes, spending less money is bad for people who want to have more money.
> > > 
> > > Wait, why?
> > 
> > Because some of them make money off of software, of course. If this
> > money stream no longer exists, they have to move elsewhere, or stop
> > making money.
> 
> Software retailers are a tiny fraction of the software and its
> supporting industries. Note how very few software retailers sell plain
> open source software (its always hidden inside some value-added
> package). But everybody else *loves* free as in beer software, consider
> Microsoft who uses gnu patch at least (an Exchange sink in .NET kit
> included gnu patch) and is rumoured to have used the BSD TCP/IP stack,
> and I think also used various pieces of BSD software in early Internet
> Explorer versions. Microsoft also releases a huge amount of free stuff
> of their own construction.
> 
> Also consider the numerous companies that have appeared to support free
> software users. They positively *adore* free software because then
> people can make use of computers more and thus buy more support.
> 
> Also computer manufacturers want to be able to sell computers without
> paying somebody for the software pre-installed (to be more competitive
> than the next guy).
>