Just because you get something when it is free doesn’t mean that you would have gotten it if you had to pay for it
Finally some judges over at the states are starting to get it.
“Although it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording though legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free,” U.S. District Judge James Jones of Virginia ruled (.pdf) in denying the RIAA’s motion to force convicted Elite Torrents admin Daniel Dove to pay tens of thousands of dollars in restitution.
Hopefully this idea will catch on here in Sweden too. Just because you get something when it is free doesn’t mean that you would have gotten it if you had to pay for it. This is true for both entertainment and software.
If I had to pay for Linux in the year 1997 (when I got my first PC) I would most likley have ended up as a Windows guy instead of a Linux guy. Lets face it:
- Solaris was fun, but the hardware was expensive (you needed to pay for Sparc stuff at the time). As a fresh member of the work force that wasn’t an option. Besides, I got employee discount on x86 hardware – not Sparc.
- Windows had all the software and games, but also a lot of problems. It ran on commodity hardware and wasn’t cost-prohibitive.
- Linux ran on commodity hardware and was free. And you had all the development tools on it as well, so you could start whacking C code without paying any extra money. And you get extra geek points for running it (look ma, no GUI).
I must say that I haven’t looked at that much software code over the years compared to the number of softwares I am running – but it feels good to be able to, and I have fixed bugs that way as well.
Would I have gone with Linux if I had to pay as much as Solaris for it? I doubt it. Actually, if it wasn’t because I worked at a computer company at the time and heard how the tech support guys was bitching about Win95 during their breaks, together with the lucky timing of my friend having a Redhat Linux installation CD, I would never had gone the Linux route at the time I did.
