Free as in Windows
Didn't Don Marti write this article in fewer words about eight years ago?
But I think it's always interesting to have this issue brought up because it's really not something that gets talked about much with regard to the United States or the rest of the developed world. I hear lots of talk about how Linux has a tough time competing with Windows in developing countries where software copyrights aren't enforced (so you can get the network effects benefits of using the most popular thing without paying the royalty the copyright holder is demanding), but I practically never hear the observation that exactly the same considerations may apply in the United States, where software copyrights are rarely enforced against individual end-users.
I still think that one of the most interesting developments will come when many hardware manufacturers offer side-by-side laptop builds with different operating systems and a visible difference of tens or hundreds of dollars in price.
Although I'm very interested in the political dimensions of software freedom today, I remember that, when I first started using free software twelve years ago that one of my motivations, apart from curiosity about the power of Unix, was the high cost of a new copy of Windows from a student's point of view. Don also wrote about this phenomenon -- again, in many fewer words.
