[Fsf-friends] Edward Cherlin's interesting point of view...

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

 	Permit me to share Edward Cherlin's interesting
 	point of view, which came up on the BytesForAll list
 	http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers
 	in another context. He makes some interesting points.
 	(I think a better word for 'commercial' software
 	would be 'proprietorial' software.) --FN

Bill Gates has a vested interest in denying the reality of progress in anything 
that Microsoft didn't invent (BASIC and other programming language products) or 
buy (much of their business) or copy (Windows) or have handed to them (PC 
DOS)...

Yup, we have it. It's called Free Software. Apache is the dominant Web server. 
You can even get it for Windows, now. Firefox recently started cutting into 
Microsoft's market share  in browsers. You can get OpenOffice, and there are 
two projects to clone Outlook and the Microsoft messaging server. Countries 
like Rwanda are creating complete sets of software in their own languages. The 
full effects of these changes have yet to be felt....

E-commerce is another good Copernican idea. Overstock.com is now the biggest 
employer in Afghanistan, selling art and craft items on the Web and paying the 
creators 70% of the final selling price. Compare that with the pennies an hour 
that children are getting in rug factories in Asia....

The big deal about Free Software is that the manufacturing cost is essentially 
zero. I am running a Linux system with Free applications that would cost 
several thousand dollars in commercial near-equivalents. All it cost me was the 
download time. From my current setup:

   Free                       Commercial

OpenOffice                 Microsoft Office
MySQL                      Microsoft Access
Quanta Plus                Microsoft FrontPage
Korganizer + Kmail         Microsoft Outlook
Gnucash                    Microsoft Money
Kivio                      Microsoft Visio
GIMP                       Adobe Photoshop
Sketch                     Abode Illustrator
Maxima                     Wolfram Mathematica
Kig Interactive Geometry   Geometer's Sketchpad
FontForge                  ParaType Fontlab
C, C++, Perl, Python, LISP/Scheme, Tcl/Tk

When I feel the need for a new program, I don't have to ask  myself whether I 
can afford it. I just do a little searching on the Net to find and compare the 
alternatives, and install my choice. Or maybe I install several to try out, and 
then decide which to keep.
-- 
Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist
Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd.
The Village Information Society
http://cherlin.blogspot.com

Forwarded via:
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Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
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http://fn.swiki.net                       http://fn-floss.notlong.com
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