[rant] owner of squeak

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Thu Dec 20 21:55:09 UTC 2001


The basic point, which needs to be understood better by the general public,
is that an Open Source system may have someone who controls the licence,
but is not "owned" in the conventional sense, and that it simply isn't
possible to hurt the "owner" by refusing to "buy" it because you can't
buy what's free and nobody can "lose" a sale that they weren't going to
get any money for and wouldn't have known about had it taken place anyway.

I'm rather upset that our government spent 10 million dollars buying
Windows XP and related software for schools when (a) a lot of schools
here have Macintoshes, and (b) Linux and StarOffice are available free,
gratis, and for nothing.  Doubtless someone who wants to boycott Sun
would be happy that the "owners" of StarOffice "lost a sale", but they
wouldn't have got any money for it, and haven't really "lost" a cent.
(StarOffice is now OpenOffice.)




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