cquirke said:
Consider if you were a developing country. You want to build skills
and infrastructure, but you want to empower your own ppl to do these
things and make the money, right?
Choosing open source over commercial sware is choosing to spend time
building skills as opposed to spending money to have someone else
provide an off-the-peg solution for you.
A developing country doesn't have money to spend, unless they borrow
it (and usually, to buy stuff from the lenders). But it does have the
need to build skills, so open source solutions may make more sense.
So yes; raising a generation who have been immersed in software they
can edit and extend may be a sharp move, and could even see them
leap-frog the rest of us if the commercial world gets too greedy and
restrictive to live with, or if geo-political concerns make it a bad
idea to source "closed" IT sware from certain countries.
I'm looking at the tech industry, and it seems to me that it is
becoming post-mature.
Whereas in the exciting days, things were being invented for the first
time that made things possible, most of today's efforts go into
crippling what is now naturally possible (e.g. embedding DRM to
prevent cost-free duplication and spread of information), or
artificially limiting value (e.g. one "ultimate" fits all, unless you
don't pay enough and we limit what you can have).
If that trend continues, then Vista could just be the last acceptable
Windows, or the last relevant Windows.
Acceptable, if we still use general-purpose PCs but the vendor's
EUL"A" terms and conditions become intolerable.
Irrelevant, if we've all switched to SaaS (Software as a Service)
and/or dedicated sub-PC devices by then.
Yes, that is all very true. What we are seeing is the major player
becoming more and more able to restrict usage via various methods.
Most of the advocates of this forget that when "They" were learning such
restrictions were due to the fact that the technology wasn't available
then, not because it was voluntarily limited. That in itself was the
motivation to learm, to break technological barriers.
We tend to accept that most piracy is outside of US control, so people
still have the learning tools there, while we are now removing those
tools from the US. We have to guard against losing both the
manufacturing capability and the technical ability to innovate, because
the rest of the world is already ahead in terms of manufacturing. How
many ships / chipsets / hardware boards etc are now actually made in the
US? How many of these items are developed new or improved in the US?
Given that young people learn more quickly how long will it be before
some team of developers writes a completely new OS that can be adopted
by a market big enough to support itself in all these fields?
