bfl
Nice, thanks. 12 pages worth, this is why many of us put up with Windows (although some run under Linux, not nearly all)
software ping
Thanks for posting
Thanks very much for posting. A nice Christmas Gift to your fellow FReepers. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all.
wow
There are some things on this list could come in handy to me.
Thanks.
I only sadly figured out the deal a short time ago.
I use open source because M$ is so bad and so expensive.
That being said...
Back in the ‘80s when the PC first gained wide acceptance, many entrepreneurs made small fortunes selling software. This was an essential part of good economic times of the ‘80s.
Unfortunately, new world order wants monopolies that they can control. The idea of people owning their own businesses and make a lot of money is the opposite of what new world order wants. Every person who manages to acquire a decent amount of wealth is a) able to self-determine, b) will start to understand that debt needs to be avoided in almost every case, c) starts to see that as a business owner they have a greater impact on society and can exercise this power, d) has time on their hands to think, plan, undertake new ventures, etc., etc., etc. Business owners don’t make good NWO slaves.
Consequently, NWO has laws and regulations regarding the capital markets, taxes, business, etc., to allow them to lure all wealthy individuals into the orbit of NWO.
But they would much rather have a society that simply precluded the sheeple from owning businesses. This is why the investors in American International Corporation jumped at the chance to promote world communism, and why NWO elites cooked up that idea way back in the early 1800’s to begin with. If a nation will accept it, it is the most efficient way to stomp out all business competition against NWO’s own monopolies which can then sell to and lend to whatever statist government NWO props up over the sheeple. The products the sheeple can buy and the jobs they can have are thus limited to the dictates of NWO, and the sheeple can be taxed into oblivion and kept as economic slaves. In the event there are planning difficulties, NWO has the fallback of simply culling the sheeple population via the statist government.
Bill Gates was long ago brought under new world order control when he took M$ public, and he has since resorted to using the NWO foundation tax dodge, essentially avoiding massive taxes required to bequeath his estate in exchange for putting his assets into a foundation that does the bidding of NWO. Laws and regulations are set up to “capture” the power of wealthy entrepreneurs in this way, after which they are helped in running their businesses as monopolies that both foster and profit from NWO agendas.
Since the major IT companies do not need to rely on getting paid full price for software, but are desperate to maintain a monopoly with only token competitors, the idea of open source software was cooked up.
Nowadays, millions of programmers are told that a) they should open source the products they develop and b) give the products away for free and c) make money off services related to the products.
New world order realizes (but most programmers don’t, smart as they are) that the real money is in selling products, since if I write a software program once but sell copies of the program to thousands of customers, my revenue can scale to far more than I could earn by selling my programming services 8 hours a day paid by the hour. The “services” business model limits me to getting paid one time by one client for each hour I work; I can only earn what I can do with my own two hands. Thus, I miss out on the benefits of the whole concept of my being able to sell my work product on a massive scale as a product.
The large IT companies mainly have three sorts of customers, namely, government, business and consumer, and all of them are neatly locked in to paying the large IT companies for their existing services and products. They are able to actually sponsor open source development - even paying a few of their employees to work on “open source” or “free” software full time, yet still they can earn plenty of revenue from sales of proprietary products and services.
The small software startup, on the other hand, could well benefit from the high profit margins of software product sales to finance its growth - as opposed to giving away its precious product for free then approaching businesses as sales prospects for its services. In growing a service business, one is limited to the growth of as many employees as one can profitably hire and bill out. Thus the growth is linear, i.e., directly tied to employee count and winning of individual service contract sales.
The big benefit for entrenched companies in open source / free software is that if a new software startup does manage to come up with a fantastic product and sales climb into the tens of millions per year - just for the product - then the open source boys (largely being paid by the big companies, mind you) can sit down a create an open source look alike competitor to the new product. It doesn’t have to be exactly as good, just reasonable, and it will be widely adopted since the mantra of open source has spread so far and wide. Thus the new company and its product can be cut off at the knees before they ever get near being serious competition for the big companies.
Of course, for hardware the traditional rules apply, as copies of the product have to be physically manufactured. But for small companies this is capital intensive; even with outsourcing of manufacturing, pricing is based on order size. A well-financed business has great advantages over the “garage” startup. The monopolists are not looking forward to a new “Apple” coming out of the blue and disrupting things, thus manufacturing is a rough-and-tumble game.
Open source, therefore, benefits large, entrenched companies far more than it benefits startups in terms of revenue.
Of course, the tradeoff is that in terms of expense, free software is cheap, which reduces the costs startups incur - if they have personnel who have the necessary expertise to work with unix.
The obvious ideal for the startup is to make use of open source software internally as much as possible to reduce costs (not to mention escape the inefficiencies of the “junk” of M$), but nevertheless sell products instead of services to increase margins and get that better-than-linear growth on the revenue side of the P&L.
It’s all about getting beyond being a serf.
Thanks. Gparted and GIMP should be in there i think. If freeware in general were included, I would say Firefox, OpenOffice or LibreOffice are the most important primary programs for both Windows and Linux. Thank God for such.
My nominee for best software package not explicitly listed here (but indirectly referred to) - Git.