Permit me to share Edward Cherlin's interesting point of view, which came up on the BytesForAll list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers in another context. He makes some interesting points. (I think a better word for 'commercial' software would be 'proprietorial' software.) --FN

Bill Gates has a vested interest in denying the reality of progress in anything that Microsoft didn't invent (BASIC and other programming language products) or buy (much of their business) or copy (Windows) or have handed to them (PC DOS)...

Yup, we have it. It's called Free Software. Apache is the dominant Web server. You can even get it for Windows, now. Firefox recently started cutting into Microsoft's market share in browsers. You can get OpenOffice, and there are two projects to clone Outlook and the Microsoft messaging server. Countries like Rwanda are creating complete sets of software in their own languages. The full effects of these changes have yet to be felt....

E-commerce is another good Copernican idea. Overstock.com is now the biggest employer in Afghanistan, selling art and craft items on the Web and paying the creators 70% of the final selling price. Compare that with the pennies an hour that children are getting in rug factories in Asia....

The big deal about Free Software is that the manufacturing cost is essentially zero. I am running a Linux system with Free applications that would cost several thousand dollars in commercial near-equivalents. All it cost me was the download time. From my current setup:

Free Commercial

OpenOffice Microsoft Office MySQL Microsoft Access Quanta Plus Microsoft FrontPage Korganizer + Kmail Microsoft Outlook Gnucash Microsoft Money Kivio Microsoft Visio GIMP Adobe Photoshop Sketch Abode Illustrator Maxima Wolfram Mathematica Kig Interactive Geometry Geometer's Sketchpad FontForge ParaType Fontlab C, C++, Perl, Python, LISP/Scheme, Tcl/Tk

When I feel the need for a new program, I don't have to ask myself whether I can afford it. I just do a little searching on the Net to find and compare the alternatives, and install my choice. Or maybe I install several to try out, and then decide which to keep.