Microsoft Against Free Software... But In Favor Of Paying Nations To Use Its Software?
from the something-doesn't-seem-right dept
With more and more countries aggressively moving to embrace free and open source software, it appears that Microsoft is using its own money to its advantage, such as with this agreement to hand over $60 million to South Korea to get it to use its software, rather than the alternatives. While it may seem silly when you take a step back and look at the situation, it does show some of the mixed up incentives related to software. Individuals and organizations can simply embrace free software, or Microsoft can pay out $60 million towards various projects now, knowing that it will pressure the South Korean gov't and firms into spending a lot more than that on its software. At some point, people will begin to realize this is just a bad deal. The programs Microsoft invests in make out well, as do some government officials, but everyone else ends up worse off.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: payments, software, south korea
Companies: microsoft
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they still missed...
I personally have been using Linux as my primary operating system on my laptop for about 4 months now(been over 4 years on ALL of my servers) and haven't really missed anything made by Microsoft. I might boot into XP once a week at most.
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Re: they still missed...
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Re: Re: they still missed...
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Re: they still missed...
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bribery?
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Re: bribery?
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Cheaper than free
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The end result is that...
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Re: The end result is that...
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I'm a PC
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Hey!
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Re: they still missed...
They (IE, WMP, Outlook, etc) no more come for free than do the wheels on your car.
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Re: Re: they still missed...
They seem to come for free with Linux. Plus OSX comes with some real worthwhile applications that are, well, you know, worthwhile.
Oh well.
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Re: Re: Re: they still missed...
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What about the EU
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Why bother?
Why would they need to pay them $60M unless they'd started porting the encryption protocol?
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Market Forces In Action
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Microsoft and South Korea
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FREE IS GOOD!!!
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