[plug] These prices are HOT

[Alex Nordstrom]

Thursday, 10 November 2005 19:21, Craig Foster wrote:
> > [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On Behalf Of Alex Nordstrom
> > The real cost of proprietary software is in the added
> > downtime, administrative overhead, data loss, &c caused by
> > their lack of reliability.

> I work in schools (properly set up schools) and Office 2003 almost
> never bjorks (unless the person is in offline mode), has little admin
> overhead as most settingss are managed by the ORK and group policy,
> has a detect and repair feature, and everybody has enough experience
> through other channels that I can do standard training instead of
> teaching the basics.

Sounds great (apart from offline mode troubles and needing a detect and 
repair feature)! Can you teach MS Exchange to add proper In-Reply-To 
and/or References headers to your e-mails too? ;)

Of course, you do realise that anecdotal evidence is not a very good 
statistical indicator and that it fails to say much, if anything, about 
risk, for example.

> The real cost of *ANY* software is added downtime, admin overhead,
> and user knowledge. Don't think it's just a MS problem. I believe
> that's why 90% of OSS is sub-par - they think they have an instant
> advantage over MS, because they are not MS.

Hence "added" (in comparison to less costly alternatives). The real cost 
of *any* software is downtime and so on. Some have more than others.

The point I wanted to make is that too many Free software advocates 
focus on purchase price, which is rather insignificant at the end of 
the day.

The Free software development model has some inherent advantages over 
closed-source software, which make the projects that manage to 
capitalise on them better than their Microsoft counterparts, not 
because Microsoft is Microsoft, but because they're a closed-source 
operation.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://lx.n3.net/
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to plug.
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