Linux and the race to the bottom
One fairly silly argument sometimes advanced against Linux is that by reducing towards zero the cost of getting a good operating system, it is somehow communist or anti-capitalist. This argument's typically put by people who think capitalism is an extremely good thing.
There certainly is a "race to the bottom" here — bottom price that is. Software features which were once very expensive can now be had at little cost, and without giving up freedoms like being able to modify the system or retaining control of your own data.
But this is a good capitalist system in action: it's *meant* to be hard for companies to make money, and particularly so if they don't continue to innovate. It's a good thing that prices keep falling, and that you can now get for negligible cost the things that used to be expensive.
Linux is just a bit of creative destruction, or destructive creation, in action.
posted Fri 17 Oct 2003 in /issues/economics | link
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