On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 04:45:02AM +0530, Raghavendra Bhat wrote:
Good, functional and `technically best' is not all that important.
Its better to say Freedom is more important than "functionality and `technical excellence". But this is valid only in personal computing, or academic usage (where we have an upper hand in decision making).
In business world only functional and `technically best products counts. They give less importance to freedom when compared to other factors. I know this should change, or may change some time later, but right now the situation is like this.
I was allowed to install one Debian box at work, only after I was able to prove that things works as per the company rules. My chants about Software Freedom was always heard with a doubtful face by the management[1].
From my experience what I feel is that, business world never care for
Freedom in computing. Most of those companies who seem to support Free Software (no they call it OSS), have some hidden agenda. Take the eg. of a famous RDBMS company. They support Linux kernel, because they find their product works better with this kernel than with any other non-free systems. Not because Linux kernel is Free as in Free Speech.
[1] The company where I work, create non-free software only.
Regards