Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
*a bunch of stuff about how great open source is*
Now look, I use open source products a lot---certainly far, far more
than the average person. And certainly even more than that when compared
with the average IT business owner. But I don't use open source products
because of politics, and I dont use them because I imagine that someone,
somewhere is auditing everything to make sure the men-in-black don't
know about my donkey-porn.
No, I do it because open source products are generally *free*. It makes
good business sense to use them wherever possible in order to cut the
gristle out of an already overweight budget. The fact that they're
audited to at least some extent by third party individuals only helps
the case, but it's not the entire case by any means.
And it has nothing to do with how evil microsoft or apple is. Honestly
I don't care how evil either one of them may or may not be--my problem
with them is that they seem to be out to limit viable choices in software
applications rather than expand on them. Whether that's evil or not...
Well, I'll let the philosophers decide that. I'm in it because I really
dig computers, man.
And I think a lot of other people in the position to purchase software,
be them individuals, managers, executives, or business owners or
whatever, care about the financial bottom line before anything else.
That's why the first thing I did when I started the company was to
go into a business partnership with IBM. And the second thing was to
go into a business partnership with microsoft. Why?
Free software from both. You should see the candy you get. It rules.
But again, I'm not blind to the rest. I use *BSD for most development
and server applications, and Linux on my main desktop. Why? Because
1. they're free. 2. they're stable. 3. they do exactly what I need
them to do.
But I use windows XP on my thinkpad. Why? Drivers man. Sheer
drivers. My wireless shit works the way I expect it to, the biometric
scanner works the way it was designed to, and the virtual crypto-drive
ability of the T60 is flawless under XP. I don't think that the
decision to use XP on my laptop makes me a traitor or a bad person.
I think it makes me a person who is open to options, and a person who
likes very much to have the *choice*.
-----yttrx
--
http://www.yttrx.net
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