Ed said:
"Choices are a drawback? Didn't you say they were a benefit? Yes, it
can be both. It can be hard to pick the right open source software to
best fit your needs."
I'd love to see this guy in a supermarket. He must spend hours in
the cereal aisle worrying that he might not pick the absolute best
kind of cereal for his needs. And what about all those fruits and
vegetables? Aaaaahhhhh! I'd just rather swallow a pill supplied to me
by Microfood.
Ted said:
"Stripes or plaid which is the right choice?"
I am so tired of these stupid arguments that just set up an artificial
either-or situation.
"GPL or LPGL?" "Debian vs. Everybody Else" "RPM vs. Deb" "DBF vs.
Client-Server"
A healthy environment is where there is a spectrum of choices,
variation along multiple dimensions, and the
consumer/customer/client/developer can choose the optimal combination
for their situation.
It's About Choice.
Ken replies:
Most of the analogies of this type are inappropriate. The complexities
involved in choosing an operating system and application software outweigh
the complexities involved in most other choices--foods, clothing, even
automobiles--as the complexities of the beach outweigh those of the single
grain of sand. I propose we stop making these kinds of analogies.
Most of the people in a position to purchase computers, operating systems,
and application software do not WANT a choice--and that includes plenty of
IT executives at the major corporations that drive the desktop OS market.
They want somebody to offer a comprehensive, self-contained solution that
works reasonably well (by their standards) and is affordable (by their
standards) and that does not require them to make choices.
The way to beat Microsoft is not to offer a plethora of confusing choices.
The way to beat them is to offer an OS that works better than theirs, is as
easy to use as theirs, runs as much software as theirs, costs no more than
theirs, and provides at least as comforting an illusion of "support" as
theirs--in other words, that competes, and wins, on all of the selling
points that make Windows so popular today.
No other course of action will dislodge this monopoly.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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