Re: [Fsfe-uk] OFT visit

[Simon Waters]

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Andrew Atkinson wrote:
>
> Anyway as far as I can see this will do only a small
> amount of good for free software and tonnes of damage to schools. One
thing
> the M$ school agreement has done is show companies the value of getting
> software into schools and most have followed suit with lowering the
prices.

Depends whether you take the long view.

Where you have a monopoly supplier the only defence against price
increases is regulation not competition.

Regulation typically won't influence other issues such as quality, or
security.

Worse still these large corporate licences are already pressuring
existing GNU/Linux in school installation, as the software bought
centrally may not run on all the operating systems in use. Although this
is a purchasing issue realy, anyone buying centrally for schools should
ensure the software runs on all of their computers before signing the
dotted line.

The big central purchasing agreements are even more stupid, 70 million a
year, how much do the NHS executives think it costs to write an OS and
desktop system?

Microsoft are managing to demonstrate that a company can be worth many
hundreds of times it's replacement cost, turning conventional economic
theory on its head.

None of this is specific to free software, as no doubt other minority
OSes feel the same squeeze as GNU/Linux with these agreements. This is
entirely about monopoly.
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