End of Operating System Payments?
Could paying for Operating Systems become a thing of the past? I think so. I mean why should we put up with another Wal-Mart monopoly like Microsoft pushing every mom-n-pop store off the market?
Why shouldn’t the Operating System be a given for any computer architecture? I suggest that we should only have to pay for new computer hardware and some utility applications–not the Operating System. Since the idea of Open Source has been thoroughly proven and tested with software like Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Open Office, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc., future generations may see a day when Operating Systems are provided without cost. If you think about it, Google is using our search patterns as a marketing tool, as well as placing advertisements in well thought out schemes. Microsoft is now joining the scheme too.
How do you like the fact that your software tracks your habbits, what sites you’ve been to, what searches you’ve made, what hardware you’ve installed, etc…Now if I can track your search patterns, and I have a monopoly over the search results, I can provide the results (with advertisements) as I see fit. I won’t go into all of the problems with this, for example heavily biased, possibly unreliable search data. But since Microsoft and Google are tracking this type of data anyway, they can use the profits from this alone to fund their software enterprises. Google has proven it already.
If you want to reduce the cost of technology upgrades, just make all Operating Systems free.
If all Operating Systems were free, which one would you choose?