I am glad to hear of Brazil's decision to encourage open-source software. It's one thing to consider an end user deciding to choose the "de facto" OS, such as Windows, but it's another thing for buisnesses. I for one feel that any business that lacks a huge amount of start-up capital, especially tech-oriented buisness, are at a huge disadvantage because of esablished "norms" in the computing world, where their only viable option is to use a close-sourced OS that can cost upwards of $150.00! Linux is free, easily modifiable to suit the needs of a specialized buisness, and more stable (not only resource management, but malware and viruses too). Many of the computers in Brazil are old, even positively ancient! Linux is a fantastic OS because it's not hardware dependent. There is always a distro out there that can run on whatever hardware you have laying around.
If I were going to build a network to work the registers and keep track of the inventory in a Walgreens (I work there, so this is from experience), and I knew that the hardware owned by the store was 20 years old, I would research which version of linux could run on 66MHz Pentium 1 with 32MB of available ram and driver support for scanner, printers, and specialized cashier displays. Unfortunately everything must run Windoze! So these doddering old computers are being wasted running a weird version of MS-DOS. These were installed in a time without ubiquitous access to the internet, so it was difficult to get the word out about free, open-source software, let alone transmit it.
There is no excuse for the modern day monopoly on the operating system market.
No comments:
Post a Comment