Subscriptions lift Red Hat revenue

TalkBack 15 of 43:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

time will tell

It could be that the world in moving towards free software. It looks that way to me.
Perhaps the billions made through shrink wrapped software will be replaced by millions through collaborately produced software like free software.

I know some folks will see this as a bad move, but it is an inevitable consequence of progress. The core driving factor here is increased communication and improved tools.
The same factors will denude the movie industry (even pixar) and the music industry of billions.

By "increased communication" read the Internet.
The internet was inevitable. The march of technology making mp3 players, and cgi film generation programs you can run in your bedroom, and the mass of cheap great music making programs (tools) was also inevitable, as was something like PHP which makes web applications amazingly easy to make. (5 lines for a discussion database).

If you align yourself with a view such as "microsoft must never fail - we need the money", or "hollywood must never fail" and so on, then you need to educate yourself with a little history.

Once, paper cost $1000s per sheet. So information was controlled by a rich subclass of people.
No one would want to go back to that sort of time, no matter how pained the paper makers were when the price of paper dropped through the floor.

Our whole society and the structure of capitalism depends on that that is expensive now becoming cheap tomorrow. This is the engine of progress, and why capitalism is successful.

{Fight it, and you weaken your society against others that accelerate past you}.

The people benefit from improved lives, and the successful have to continue to drive forward to stay wealthy*.

* = note wealth is a relative term.
As the people as a whole become wealthy because they can make their home videos and music, the successful can no longer define their wealth by being able to do that (see home movies of Kings and Queens in 1910 - now we're all doing it), they have to move on to greater things, like taking a trip in Virgin Galactic Spaceship One.

Being a luddite is a disproven behavioural pattern in the modern world. I know it's scary when the core reason for your job is lost. Hey it's happened to me, it's happened to a lot of people, over and over, but you know, you survive and, most people are very good at competing when they have to. Just go find some opportunity.
I've met coal miners in the UK who went on to develop new careers when the coal mining all got offshored for cost reasons, hey they survived, and then went on to better things.

Posted by: hipparchus2000   Posted on: 04/01/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS to Achieve Highly Available, Load-Balanced Clusters Dell The Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS operating system integrates Cluster ... Download Now
• The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now