On Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:35:05 -0500
Mark Filipak <markfilipak.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
that, and the
> knowledge that, because it's free, people who could help, won't (or
> bail out at the first sign of trouble)... and because it's free,
> complaints and/or suggestions seem like bitching and no one likes to
> listen to someone bitch.
>
Think about the other implications of 'free', as opposed to 'paid for'.
Think about a company with a very high market share, and it becomes
obvious that most of its efforts will go into maintaining that market
share, and much of *that* effort will go into maximising
incompatibility with other manufacturers. Producing what the customer
needs will run a very poor second to maintaining market share. Remember
when Windows 7 Beta (I think they called it 'Vista') was actually put
up for sale as a full-priced product, because they needed to maintain
a market presence, not because it was finished? Debian Stable is
released when pretty well all the bugs are out, not on a particular
date.
Think about software as a business. It's no good if you just buy
Windows or Office once. Think about the mandatory rearrangement of the
user interface in every new version of Office, concealing the fact that
the core features haven't changed in decades (the first version I used
was 95, and today I rarely use anything that wasn't in it then, and
the original Apple version had pretty much all those features.
Microsoft learned how to write the first Windows from writing Office
for Apple). All that has really changed are the output possibilities,
now PDFs and web pages are produced within Office (and have you ever
seen the HTML produced by Office?) and that documents are now XML-based.
This isn't just theoretical: I help out in the Microsoft Small Business
Server forum (less often now that my Iceweasel won't post to it, nor
Konqueror, I need to fire up Midori to get the site to work properly
). I'm not at all impressed by the percentage of peoples' problems
which are purely artefacts of Microsoft's marketing policies ('No, that
won't work, Server XXXX doesn't work with more than one NIC or with a
non-/24 network address,' etc.)
There's a lot more to software being free than trouble getting help
with it, and in my experience, unless you put up a significant chunk of
cash per incident, Microsoft aren't interested in helping you either.
The warranties on paid-for software (found one yet?) say all you need
to know about the back-up you'll get just because you handed over some
money a year or two ago.
Oh, and are you happy with the attitudes of Windows software vendors to
the ownership of 'your' computer? I just removed a drive-by
installation of a McAfee something or other from my Win7 box. I do
usually spot these before they happen, and untick the boxes, but I
obviously missed one. I've no idea what wanted program it sneaked in
on. There's nothing like this in Linux, or at least at the Debian end
of Linux. But in the Windows world, the vendors are doing you a big
favour by allowing you to give them money, and in return they'll walk
all over 'your' computer and invite their friends in for a party.
That's probably the single most offensive part of the Windows world, as
far as I'm concerned.
--
Joe
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