On Company000's acquisition of Company001

On Company000's acquisition of Company001

Posted Nov 6, 2003 17:10 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: On Company000's acquisition of Company001 by evgeny
Parent article: On Novell's acquisition of SUSE

> 94% of its multi-billion assets are legal

Source of income cannot justify holding power over computer users.

> Why should you (business) bother considering using free software?

Because without software freedom, you do not fully own your data. And with file format lock-in, you cannot choose the best tool for the job.

> Why should you (senators) consider using the antitrust laws against us?

Because monopoly status of the OS has been used to gain monopoly status in the Office software realm as well as other realms.

> If it were 6% or so indeed, MS would happily made its software
> free (as in beer), since the neglible 6% would be easily
> compensated by a jump in the installed base[beer]

I don't know much about Windows anymore. There could also be business motives for putting a high price on the box. One thing to remember is that their install base couldn't get much higher no matter what they do.

As mentioned, I can't put up a decent defence for this statistic, but I can still defend that software freedom does not have to destroy profits.

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