On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 09:37:21AM +0530, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
Finally, what will drive the market is availability of products and ability to create business applications at an acceptable cost.
True! The weak area of FOSS is that nobody owns it so there is no aggressive marketing thought process.
When low cost laptops are sold, they come with a disclaimer that "it has linux pre-loaded which is free so it has limitted functionality until another operating system is installed". Does it imply that linux being a free os will never have the full functionality of a 'paid' os?
Why is it that even commercial linux distros or their free versions like RH, Mandrivia, Suse, Novel etc. fail to make it to the desktop computers and laptops as 'fully functional' OSes?
When pc or laptop manufacturers make such claims of limitted functionality of linux, can they be pulled up for mis-representation of facts? If a manufacturer provides linux pre-loaded, to what extent does the onus lie on that manufacturer to provide it as a 'fully functional' OS or stop pre-loading it at all, instead of doing linux a dis-service. To what extent is a device manufacturer liable to provide fully functional device drivers?
If we look at it from the consumer guidance and protection ideology, shouldn't a buyer have every right to know what hardware he/she is buying and have full details available to:- a) Enable the device maker to provide ready drivers for that device, irrespective of the os platform. or b) Provide enough details to let others create drivers for the same device.
What is the use of buying hardware that does not function in the buyers' systems? Does making a claim that the device will only be supported in certain OSes absolve the manufacturer of providing multi-os support? Why is software still a grey area when it comes to consumer protection?
Regards,
Rony.
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