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Re: [tlug] Re: Post my article on tlug.jp?



On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Lyle H Saxon wrote:

Does that include an "essentially" free copy of MS-Office Professional?

Nope.

And your time - do you consider yourself to be more effectively using
your time with Windows than with Linux?

I almost never use Windows, so obviously it doesn't suck up much of my time. For me, though, Windows system administration is certainly much more expensive than Unix.

How about a company of many thousands of employees?  Do you consider
the licensing fees they pay for MS-Windows and MS-Office to be
"essentially" free?

Nope. Unlike me, if they decided not to use Windows, they would actually spend less money. (I spend the same whether I use it or not, at least when it comes to laptops.)

They only way you could argue that Windows was not free to me is if you
could find a plausable way that I could have saved money by not getting
Windows. That way doesn't exist, ergo, for the purposes of my economic
decision, it was free.

That's a good piece of sophistry there, but it still wasn't actually free.

That's not sophistry; it's what I hope is a sensible economic analysis of the situation. Keep in mind that the original point of all of this was to look at how people made the decision to use or not use Windows. The original article said that people were paying $200 to use Windows over Linux. That seems to me a grossly flawed analysis: for almost all laptops, and most systems from major vendors such as Dell and HP, the end total cash outlay by the user is the same whether they use Windows or Linux is the same.

Microsoft sold the OS to the manufacturer and the manufacturer passed
that cost on to you. Because it wasn't itemized and because you don't
think about it doesn't mean it was free.

But I did think about it! I know well that some of the money I spend on my laptop went to MS. But again, the bottom line of what I pay is the same either way.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com


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