Essay RFC delayed.

[Signal 11]

Nils Lohner wrote:

> Can you give me a brief summary of the benefits of free software for the end
> user, and if you have them, to businesses as well?  I'm trying to gert a

For the end-user, a few things off the top of my head...

- Product obsolescence.  It's very difficult to kill a (quality) open source
  project.  Witness the Apache project, or Linux.  You can be reasonably assured
  that these products will continue to exist and be supported for a long time to
  come.  Can you say that about windows 95?  3.1?  OS/2?  HP-UX?  MacOS?

- Quality.  Open source as a whole benefits by not needing to reinvent the
  wheel.  Infact, this may actually lead to high quality de facto standards -
  everybody plays "follow the leader" in open source.  Note that unlike the
  commercial market, the playing field remains level even if a competing product
  has 90% market share - nothing prevents a developer from making a derivative
  product that works better... or a whole new product.. with seamless backwards
  compatibility with the current market leader.  Unlike Microsoft's Word Document
  Format, free software has the code readily available - no more of this
  "extend and embrace" to promote incompatible standards.

- Interoperability.  Because the source is open, interoperability with 
  several programs is easy.  You can be reasonably certain that your free
  word processors will all operate well with not only other free software programs, 
  but also closed-source competitors.

That's just what I can come up with.. I've cross-posted this to license-discuss though so maybe other benefits can be brought up.  Eric, are you out there?


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