"Revolution OS" (The Movie).

[Tristan Wibberley]

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).

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

No opinion expressed here is intended to represent those of my employer,
nor has my employer reviewed/approved this message as representative of
its opinion.