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| Authored by: mcinsand on Thursday, January 31 2013 @ 04:42 PM EST |
Dismissing FOSS support as a matter of ‘religion’ goes along with the recent
publicity concerning Munich’s infrastructural transition. There are some truths
that MS desperately needs to keep swept under the rug, and one biggie is that
FOSS, especially the GPL branches, would not be doing so well if not for the
performance. If licenses were equal, initial cost outlay, and business
practices were the same, would you use Windows or Linux? My company uses Linux
for its servers for reliability and security, and I am certain they would
continue to do so even if Linux licenses cost more than Windows server. For
that matter, I know that I would do the same.
Although the underlying philosophy of open-ness and continued intellectual
reinvestment have set the direction of the GPL software world, Android, the GPL,
and Linux’ expansion have to do with performance. Or, to put it into a term MS
likes to use: TCO. TCO drove me to leave the only real computing world I had
known (outside of a brief stint with RDOS in the ‘80’s). There came a point
when I decided that I simply did not have the time to constantly wrestle with a
system that needed constant nursing. This was a then-current hardware set and
running Windows XPSP2. After a year, I realized that it was the XP, not me, and
the constant time required made it unacceptably expensive. Fedora was an
instant success. Although I appreciate the commitment to the principles behind
the GPL, I don’t stay with FOSS for the philosophy; I stay because it is less
expensive for me to use for my personal computing needs, in terms of the time
commitment. The added choices are great, and they would affect what I would pay
for Linux, if I had to.
MS might try to FUD people into thinking that FOSS is only a matter of a set of
arbitrary beliefs, but the truth is that most of us, especially average users
like me, would never have switched and stayed if not for performance.
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