On Aug 19, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> This is by far the common case; you can (and did) list a small
> number of items that people get worked up about, but if a guy like
> Doug doesn't seem bothered by the tradeoff presented by iTunes, I
> think you're pretty far from establishing the political angle as
> being that important.
Re: that political angle. Excuse my cynicism, but I think a lot of people who kvetch about paying to download stuff from iTunes or paying for software are more exercised by the paying part than the political part. They want stuff for free. Yeah, I like stuff for free, too, but really, don't people deserve to be compensated for their labor? It sucks when record companies get the money instead of musicians, or pig publishers instead of writers, but reducing the payment to 0 isn't going to raise the income of musicians or writers.
> I see the whole F/OSS world as Just Another Vendor, with it's ups
> and downs; it's a slam-dunk decision in only a few cases, with
> software that has such high value and has had such attention paid to
> it over the years that you'd be an idiot not to use it. But like my
> Michael Jordan example, it's the exception and not the rule. And
> for every Apache, there's a Microsoft Excel to counter it.
As I've complained before, OpenOffice blows. My 9-year-old version of Office is hundreds of times better.
Doug