There’s a (good and interesting) story on Cnet about a man who makes the best guitar strings in the world, and switched to Linux after being busted by the BSA. It wasn’t the money he minded; it was the subsequent public humiliation, and the fact that his crimes were entirely inadvertent. All he had done was to change the ownership of computers without wiping the hard disks.
There are a couple of fine, counter-intuitive points. One is that Linux, whatever is better than Windows if you want to run your office like a chicken battery:If you put a bunch of stuff on people’s desktops they don’t need to do their job, chances are they’re going to use it. I don’t have that problem. If all you need is word processing, that’s all you’re going to have on your desktop, a word processor. It’s not going to have Paint or PowerPoint. I tell you what, our hits to eBay went down greatly when not everybody had a Web browser. For somebody whose job is filling out forms all day, invoicing and exporting, why do they need a Web browser? The idea that if you have 2,000 terminals they all have to have a Web browser, that’s crazy. It just creates distractions.
But the great line was a throway at the end: Microsoft is a growing business with $49 billion in the bank. What do they care about me? That should be the marketing line for SuSE and OOo.