MS Office on Linux 14799

"The notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit... the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest... is not supported by statute nor common law." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line"

Now, Heinlein was writing before the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, but consumers and compebreastors have even *less* obligation to support pricing models against their own interest.

Of course, open source can also reduce the amount of capital needed to develop a product:

Short-term, I'm sure. It can have benefits long-term. Look at, say, the VCR. Totally changed the landscape for the movie industry, but now they make *more* money, and most of it from video sales, not theater receipts.

Can you privide any evidence that this has actually happened in the computing area? New products keep appearing for Linux and Unix, good ones. Certainly the *only* thing I 'need' Windows for at home at this point is certain games... I can do everything else with Linux.

I'll take cheaper. My family will be vacationing in Florida this year (near you, I imagine, since you seem to be in the Orlando area), and we wouldn't be doing it without cheap airfare; we'd be much closer to home.

And, as the canonical example goes, there isn't much profit in making horsewhips now that the automobile has come along. Markets change. This is a *good* thing. There are losers, but also winners.

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. - C.A.R. Hoare