Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 24, 2016 2:10 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

"free as in puppy"

This is from an old anti-Linux talking points from Microsoft. There was a time when at nearly every Microsoft channel partner meeting the Microsoft speaker's children had just been given a free puppy and an analogy was made by the speaker about dealing with Linux.

The speaker's obvious lie and co-opting their home life to make commercial point caused less positivity than the US-based speakers may have expected.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 30, 2016 6:39 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

I, too, was reminded of the old total-cost-of-ownership marketing by Microsoft and other unfree software vendors.

But Ben Cotton makes another point: /maintaining/ free software has direct financial costs, and, like buying a helmet for your volunteer fire duty, should give you tax benefits.

The quote did not transport this well, but IMO the „free as in puppy“ should be scrapped altogether. Even if it did not stem from antagonistic marketing, it still evokes „free as in {beer,freedom}“, which both talk about costs to the /user/, not the maintainer.