That incredible stupid, misinformed and ignorant statement came during an class I was attending yesterday. It was a uttered as a response to a question asking if there was an alternative mac-compatible program to a Microsoft-program we have to run during that class. “Windows is free, why don’t you run that” a fellow student said. The Mac-guy was a bit annoyed by that. Myself, as a free software supporter, I was fucking furious.
I’m not sure what kind of direction this guy came from to arrive at that conclusion. He may have bought a computer, or several computers over a longer period of time, with some copy of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and got into his head that the operating system itself don’t cost any money. He might have gotten the OS from someone in his family, I’m not sure if that is legal or not and I don’t care because I run gNewSense. He might have found it on the Internet, and believed that stuff found on the Internet is free. One other thing I found out was that the school I attend have some kind of agreement with Microsoft that enables the school to give away licenses to students, because the school is paying such an outrageous amount of money anyway. He may even have been referring to this deal, but still Windows is not free. Someone have paid for the license, in this case the Norwegian people through taxes.
So there you have it, there are ignorant and/or misinformed people all around us. Even on a higher engineering education that educate IT-professional. Guess I have a lot of “free software”-education to do during this and other classes.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Hey,
I seem to be in the same boat as you – I too dislike the use of Microsoft and their crappy programs in schools (in Australia) and it also really riles me about the relationship between the Education Department and Microsoft.
I am adding you to my blog-roll.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Thanks a lot mate!
I will need to read some of your writing as well
March 14th, 2009 at 5:14 am
very nice rant
All i have to add to it really is this: even if microsoft were giving away windows for free, it still wouldn’t be free – as in beer (let alone free as in speech). It’d still cost you hours and hours of frustration and the loss of your privacy. That’s a high price to pay for a bad operating system, if you ask me. Slapping 150 euros on top of that is more of an insult than a business practice. If i’d use windows, i’d feel quite stupid every time some obscurecom.dll crashes the system…
March 18th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Thanks, you have a nice one to http://stefano.soup.io/post/15527849/GNU-really-is-not-UNIX
It’s quite annoying having your operating system crash after having spent money on it. If my GNU/Linux system crash it is all my fault, and I didn’t spend any amount of money on it.