Microsofts new way of bashing Linux

[Alexander Jacob Tsykin]

On Friday 16 June 2006 11:10, Andrew Zajac wrote:
> Microsoft make more money because they were able to convince people that
> software is the same kind of product as any material goods.
>
and there is a solid argument to be made for this
> I think people are shortly going to notice that they are paying proprietary
> software companies to hold back the develpment of the software.  The
> software can get better in thousands of ways, but no one is allowed to do
> anything with it, except for the employees of the owner of that software.
>
most people do not want to improve it. They don't have the time or the 
inclination.
> I think of it like this:  When doctors make a brave new discovery which
> results in new and innovative ways to cure people, do they charge other
> doctors for the privilege of learning the new technique?  If that were so,
> would healthcare be at the level of practice that it is today?
>
actually they do, its called a seminar. Doctors don't learn things by 
telepathy, they need to pay to learn. Otherwise they pay for medical journals 
to learn about new techniques. How did you think they did it?
> Doctors (as well as all other health care scientists - except for
> pharmaceutical companies) share their knowledge and it gets improved upon
> every day.  The fact that no one can claim a particular surgical technique
> as their property and forbit others from performing it is a good parallel
> to this example of software.
>
They need to teach others, who pay for it, effectively making it their 
property in practice, if not in law. And in any case, they get government 
grants, so they can afford to do so. Software companies do not get these sort 
of government subsidies. 
> If doctors routinely did that, you would have some really rich doctors,
> some really talented doctors who were not allowed to perform surgeries,
> extraordinarily high healthcare costs and a lot of realy sick people
> because innovation would suffer.
>
All of these already occur, including talented doctors who can';t perform 
procedures because they can't afford the courses or equipment.
> Now, (back to reality) if people obtained software for free and only paid
> someone when they needed it to do something it doesn't do and those
> improvements were given back to the community, the software would improve
> at a considerably faster rate than it does presently for proprietary
> software.
>
As I have said previously, software is a tool. If it works sufficiently well 
to be useful, then that is all that is required. There is no point in fitting 
a drill with a hammer.
> If people ended up spending an equal amount of money as they do today on
> software, but each dollar went into genuine development (paying at the
> point of value), instead of some company collecting the same royaly for the
> same software over and over, I think we would really see some intersting
> software, developed at a staggering rate.
>
Which applies for absolutely any commodity which is in demand, and is a 
Utopian vision never to be realised.

Sasha