[Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan onWindows?

[Duncan]

walt posted on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:22:04 -0800 as excerpted:

> However, in very small print near the bottom of the cover page:  "XENIX
> is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation".
> 
> I remember that anyone was free to copy the diskettes containing the OS
> itself -- but we had to pay big bucks to MS for the eight-volume set of
> documentation for XENIX (which I still have, thirty years after XENIX
> bit the dust).  Funny to think we happily paid the big bucks for the
> eight volumes of documentation because we copied the OS for free.  Bill
> was never stupid, not for a nanosecond.

FWIW, O'Reilly Publishing isn't so stupid, either.  And because I'm no 
longer spending the money on software, there's more for documentation. =:^)

(Tho really, /most/ of the savings go to the hardware folks, the 
/real/ monetary beneficiaries of MS pushing me to freedomware.  I'd say 
it's easily a couple thousand if not more spent on hardware now, that 
would have gone to software, likely mostly MS software, had MS not given 
me that push and I had continued the way I had been going.  I used to 
split my computer spending about 48/48/4, hardware/software/other, but it 
has been about 90/10 hardware/other since I switched to Linux, with 
documentation forming most of "other".  But I guess that means I've still 
pretty much doubled both my hardware spend and my documentation spend, so 
they've both come out pretty well, to the expense of mostly MS, making it 
even /more/ ironic that I may have never made the switch without MS' push.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman