Monday, June 9, 2008

Free is the new Black

I am sure that most of you all out there have gotten "free" stuff for service. For example: free mobile phones, free dish satellites, etc. Well, if the sign says free then why do you have to sign a 1yr or 3yr contract to get your free-ness on?

Because none of it is free, it is just subsidized by the bloated service contract.

Open source software is never free. Even if the developers let you download it from the web for no charge their energy, and effort went into it to create it.

When I talk to freetards who think that OSS is free I try to remind them while the distribution may be, the support is most certainly not. This past week Amazon.com was down and the global outage cost to Jeff Bezos was $31,000/minute and $16,000/minute for North America. They use OSS in their infrastructure but it was internal and external support that got them back up and running and not freeware.

You know what they say...time is money.

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