Originally posted by: Markbnj
I'd say it is about competition, which is almost always good. It's tough to make a case for dumping investor dollars into any serious effort to compete with MS, so the programmer community did it for free. I don't use Linux regularly, and I often disagree with the communitarian, anti-capitalist underpinnings of the "movement," but at the same time I think it has had nothing but positive effects on the overalll marketplace.
Ha. "anti-capitalist"?
Microsoft is anti-capitalist because they do everything they can to setup barriers to competition. They use lots of legal methods to do this, some legally and morally dubious, such as leveraging their monopoly on the desktop for many years to manipulate other businesses.
They use the government to setup barriers to competition also. Such at the patent rhetoric. Every spring or so for the past 3-4 years they've going on a agressive campaign to use the patent situation in a attempt to scare people away from using Linux, threatening people and such things.
Linux is very pro-capitalist in the way that it dramaticly lowers the barriers to competition.
Captialism only works in a society were costs of entry into a new market is low. So that new businesses and individuals can come in and provide better solutions. The barrier must be low. It's impossible nowadays to write a new OS from scratch and have any hope of competiting with any large software maker.
Linux is all about these sort of things, it's all about lowering barriers and making technology more aviable, more approachable to more people. All you need is the skills and the determination and you can provide solutions that are as complex and effective as anybody else.
To make money all you need to do is be better at what your doing then other people. When somebody pays for a Redhat license or buys services from IBM or other company regarding Linux it is because it's advantagous for _themselves_, not becuase they have to.
The business case for paying for Linux systems is because by doing that a business can save money by spending it. That if there is no business case for paying for the software nobody is going to force them to.
Meanwhile Microsoft is using government laws and propping up legal groups like the BSA to force people to pay for the software they require. For a lot of companies they got locked into the way MS does their file formats and network protocols and have no choice by to be forced by Microsoft to pay licensing fees otherwise they will face legal sanctioning through invasive and expensive auditing or just plan lawsuits.
And Microsoft is going after small profitable businesses like Xandros and are using patent lawsuit blackmail to trick people to paying Microsoft for licenses for software they did not create and for innovations they are not responsible for.
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