[Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share

[Conrad Knauer]

"If I am paying I would choose something that is functional out the box
and MS delivers."

Actually most people would argue that if you want to pay for proprietary
software, Apple delivers far better than MS ;)

"this is a choice and people have the choice to continue to use MS or
not"

How is it a choice when people can't easily buy a prebuilt system
locally without an OS or with a free OS preinstalled? ("Observe that a
majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.")

Sure, people can choose to download and install Firefox, but you don't
usually see it preinstalled.  If Firefox was preinstalled on all Windows
computers, how many people would go out of their way to install IE7?
(not many I think)  The same thing with VLC or OpenOffice.org or the
GIMP, etc. etc. even though those all exist for Windows; preinstallation
of proprietary software on retail computers is a barrier to usage of
FOSS.

Fortunately, even with this barrier to overcome, the message is getting
out; as per http://www.xitimonitor.com/fr-fr/technique/firefox-
mars-2007/index-1-1-3-77.html nearly a quarter of all Europeans using
the internet are using Firefox! (with a high of 44.5% in Slovenia :)

And once they're using Firefox on Windows, its not a big leap to using
Firefox on Linux... of course, if they can find a computer to buy with
preinstalled Linux that is.

-- 
Microsoft has a majority market share
https://launchpad.net/bugs/1