[samsquire]

Linux and open source removes the capacity for people to compete against it commercially. It takes air out of the room. Why would we pay you when we can get this for free?

free as in 0 cost is very difficult to compete against unless you are 100, 1000x times better.

There is the value that would have been provided (generated) in revenue to UNIX manufacturers had Linux not existed and the value that exists with Linux being free. These are two numbers.

One is a tangible financial number, the other is another tangible financial number from profits not needing to pay for a UNIX manufacturer.

It's difficult to say what would have happened, but you cannot deny that prices for corporate UNIX DID in fact exist, and they were not getting paid due to the availability of the free option.

Also, remember that the UNIX manufactuerers would have produced value too, so you need to include the value produced by UNIX versus the value produced by Linux minus licence costs.

If you're using the argument that if everything was free then there would be infinitely more value than things being commercial, then why isn't everything free, if that truly produces more value?

I would expect everything to be free if that was truly the better option.

[quanticle]

>It's difficult to say what would have happened, but you cannot deny that prices for corporate UNIX DID in fact exist, and they were not getting paid due to the availability of the free option.

Yes, this is the problem of "the seen and the unseen" in economics. Prices for corporate Unix did exist, and they are not getting paid now. That is the seen. What is unseen is the value that was created by having a cheap (Linux isn't free --- you still need to pay people to set it up, patch it, provide support, etc) operating system that was available to anyone with an Internet connection. Would Google exist without Linux? Absolutely not. Would the iPod exist without Linux? No. What about all the value created by smartphones?

When balancing all of those against the profits of proprietary Unix vendors, I feel comfortable in saying that the existence of Linux is a giant net positive for the world, even if it did result in the proprietary Unix vendors going out of business.

[samsquire]

Yes, I accept all the value that was generated by Linux is tangible and it's extreme.

I'm thinking from the principle of work: if you do some work for someone and it is not reimbursed, then it's obviously good for the people receiving your work but not necessarily the people working.

It's not the revenue from corporate UNIX that I'm thinking of, it's the being reimbursed for your work problem. The potential value produced by the non-free thing was destroyed.

Earning money is hard enough as it is, but today everyone expects everyone else to work for them for free, with nothing in return. If people stopped working on open source for free, would the value still be created?

To reiterate my point in my comment: if free things produce more value than commercial things, why isn't everything free?

[fluoridation]

> Would Google exist without Linux? Absolutely not.

What are you saying? That Google as it exists now would not exist? That's probably correct. That no one else would have created an equivalent search engine? That's much less obvious.

> Would the iPod exist without Linux? No.

Why do you need a FOSS OS to make a portable digital audio player with a hard drive?

> What about all the value created by smartphones?

Why do you need a FOSS OS to make cell phones with integrated computers?

[pjmlp]

Since when does iPod have anything to do with Linux?!?