Monday 24 December, 2007

A Resounding accolade to Open-ness!

-Akshay Ranganath

In the hard-headed economically oriented and prestigious magazine, The Economist, Open Source has come in for a lot of praise. Read the article on predictions for the year 2008 with regards to adoption of Linux based machines by enterprises. Sample this: Asus Eee comes at a nifty price of just $ 400 - pre-loaded with Open Source tools along with Linux as the OS.

Compare this to a $ 1,000 PC that comes with Business editions of Windows Vista with added costs for procuring Microsoft Office, Exchange et al. and the money seems significant. The article concludes saying:

"Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud."

Amen from FLOSS!

Reference:

Three fealess predictions - http://economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10410912