[illys]

I am confortably working on hardware 10 to 15 years old. So do all the people of my family and the non-technical friends I help. This is possible with Linux and software resulting from the free and open source communities.

With proprietary OS, all this hardware would be trashed. It would go in waste dumps or poor countries to be dismantled at high health and environment expense. And I would buy new hardware requiring more nature destruction with mining of rare materials. Finally this additional investment would decrease my financial capacity to do other things.

So to make a long story short, the many (millions?) people preserving their hardware investment with open source software are saving environment, health and money to a large extend.

And last but not least, they weaken software company monopolies, which can only be good for society as well.