On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
When you conflate impoverished and principled readers,
you are talking about
two distinct demographics. The issue is that modern software requires modern
hardware and when there is no money for software, chances are that the
hardware is substandard. This is not the case for "principled" users. They
*can
and do *buy the hardware to run the latest and greatest software.
Modern free software requires hardware old 5 years (surprisingly,
contemporary processors are around 2x1.5-2.5GHz, while 5 years ago it
was around 1x2-3GHz; 5 years ago ordinary new computers had
256MB-512MB of RAM with a possibility to buy more; now new computers
have 512MB-1GB of RAM). A lot of companies have 2 or 3 years of
hardware recycling period and older computers are usually donated or
sold for small amount of money. You may run very well all important
new free software (Firefox, OpenOffice and similar) with 5 years old
computer. (Actually, I have 4 years old laptop which works quite fine
with the newest software.)
While hardware is some issue, it is much lesser issue to find someone
to donate to you hardware or to buy it for 50 EUR/USD than proprietary
proprietary software for 500+ EUR/USD (or, even, for a couple of
thousands of EUR/USD).
So, while this Gregory's argument is not an absolute one, it is very
close to the reality.
An impoverished reader might use skype, a principled
reader would not. One
group is about cost to them and the other is about principles. Politically
it is expedient to make these group seem to be as one. They are not. It is
for instance known that Microsoft prefers people to use their software
illegally then to have them use other software. It is for this reason that
the argument that copyright violation is stealing is a lie; when Microsoft
truly believed this, it would fight illigal software everywhere equally and
this does not happen.
I don't have anything against anyone who is using "illegal" software.
But, I don't want to use it because I am not able to improve that
software; as well as I am not able to be sure that my products made by
using such software would be supported after some amount of time.
Also, I have a limited time in my life and I don't want to spend a lot
of time on learning technology which I may have to abandon because of
a management decision of some company.
So, we have a lot of practical problems related to adoption of
proprietary software -- if we are thinking about our [collective]
future.
And about using Skype: Yes, Skype is good enough (but: just because
there is no better software) for communication. However, it is not
possible to upgrade Skype with your own needs. I am sure that anyone
who is working with sound and video is able to find a number of very
useful things which Skype is not able to do, while it wouldn't be a
big deal to make it if it would be free software.
BTW, Skype is not the only software which is working well for VoIP.
Ekiga is working quite well, and it worked very well (as Gnome
Meeting) 5 years ago. Actually, it doesn't have daily peaks, like
Skype has because communication is a direct one; as well as you may
improve Ekiga, while you are not able to improve Skype.