Yet another reason to get angry with Bill...

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 23:46 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Developed nations have no need to do so. Commercial software does
> offer some pretty significant advantages that FAR outweigh the cost
> associated with those packages. 
> The % for IT costs are miniscule vs. %
> cost of salaries for people using computers. If you can squeeze an
> extra 10% of work out of a workforce that's costing you an average of
> Euro 25K/a by investing an extra Euro 200/a in commercial software
> licences you'd be an idiot not to.

Arf, yeah maybe... it's not an excuse to break my dream ;o)
Thankfully, more and more companies, the same that count their beans,
did and do switch to Linux, so it can't be that bad.
Anyway, I don't really dream of a Linux that would have 99% market share
like Windows on the desktop. What would be cool is to be in the same
position as Apple : big enough to attract attention from hardware
vendors so they write drivers or at least fully release their H/W specs
and fully cooperate with the Linux community, but small enough not to
attract too much attention from malware writers.


> Korea isn't exactly a "developing" nation anymore (it passed that
> barrier many decades ago ;). 

Okay I was pushing it a bit, I was just crossing fingers that you would
be kind enough not to jump on it... I should have known you better by
now ;o)

> Their GDP PPP is near the bottom of the
> highly developed nation but at $20300 USD they're not doing too badly
> at all!!!

Yeah, the country might be rich/developped, but how are the people who
live in there ? It's like in Frog land, rich country (though given we
have a big overdraft, we aren't technically any richer than any African
country...), but the habitants are getting poorer and poorer, as the
cost of life increased a loooot in the past 5/10 years, but the salaries
not only don't rise accordingly, but they rather stagnate or decrease...
So in Africa, I am sure there must be some not so poor countries, but
the habitants are extremely poor because their governments like to waste
the little money they have, on expensive and useless toys like fighter
aircrafts and tanks, rather than books pencils and teachers and water.
Pfff..... :o(


--
Vince