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Re: [News] Ubuntu GNU/Linux Too Easy to Set Up, New Release Promising

On 2008-04-09, chrisv <chrisv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> JEDIDIAH wrote:
>
>>On 2008-04-07, Tony Smith <tony_smith100@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> The same could be said for many of the Distros out there, 
>>> and so much time, effort and skill is going to waste by trying to re-invent
>>> the wheel.
>>
>>(snip)
>>
>> The fact that 10 or 20 separate companies have their own R&D
>>departments fiddling with 100 year old combustion engine technology
>>is a necessary means to an end.
>>
>>    Your "concerns" about Linux could just as easily apply to cars.
>>
>>    The forks are generally where the progress comes from.
>
> You make good points, but even you are selling-short the efficiencies
> of OSS.

    Free software is a market response to the problem of how monopolies
are prone to get entrenched with software producrts with no standardized
interfaces. It is a likely (and probably inevitable) response of the 
unregulated market to address all it's customers. When there aren't 
exit barriers for the customers, the benefits of Free software are 
less dramatic.

     You see this to a lesser degree with cars even. The main market
is healthy enough that it won't trigger the automotive equivalent of
a free softwrae movement.

>
> For car engines, it is true that things like "pistons" and "camshafts"
> are in the public domain, but it's also true that each company keeps
> new research and technology secret, in order to obtain a competitive
> advantage.  How inefficient that multiple companies have redundant R&D
> going-on to achieve the same goal!  This is analogous to the
> closed-source world.  With OSS, such wasteful redundancies are largely
> eliminated.  
>
> Example:  You like Notepad.exe, but it lacks some features that you
> would like.  With OSS, you grab the source for Notepad, add to it, and
> you're done!  With closed-source, you're starting from scratch, TRULY
> "re-inventing the wheel!"

     Engineering costs are amortized over all users, so this isn't 
really that compelling of an argument. This also makes it more 
feasable for the existence of multiple similar tools.

-- 

	iTunes is not progressive. It's a throwback.		|||
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