[OT] Monopolies and software

[Robert Brockway <robert () timetraveller org>]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> Quite offtopic. But what I still wonder is why the heck one
> isn't allowed to do business and become large.

It's the monopoly that so many of us have a problem with.  Leveraging
dominance in one market to gain control of another.  Many large companies
have tried this sort of thing.

> Is it all jealousy? If they where so bad why do they get
> the revenue and not your company producing super duper software?

The answer to that one is easy: Marketting.  Those involved in the final
authorisation of software purchasing today are rarely highly technical.
They are often swayed by claims that techs/Sysadmins would dismiss
quickly.

> Linux/BSD and many other products have proven that there
> is a market for it, but apparently they are not up to par
> with the established products. If you want to win then

I don't see that the available evidence supports that ascertion.  It is
invalid to assume that a market makes the best product dominant.  There
are plenty of counter-examples for this outside computing.  In addition
factors like the age/maturity of a product and (again) how it is marketted
have a big impact.

I happen to believe that OSS is showing itself to be superior through the
accountability and flexibility it provides as well as the demonstrably
more rapid security fixes (just compare the speed of patches applied to Linux
distributions vs SCO Openserver recently).  In any case this is my
personal opinion.  Some will agree and some will disagree.

I won't post further on this topic.  I find after one or two posts
threads like this lose cohesion and becomes unuseful.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert () timetraveller org, zzbrock () uqconnect net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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