Re: [Xiph-Advocacy] Re: [Speex-dev] Microsoft RTAudio
"Aaron Whitehouse" <[email protected]> Wed, 5 Sep 2007 21:28:10 +1200
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.multimedia.ogg.advocacy |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> > The little dirty secret that nobody dares talk about is that > > the open source religion was born out of anti-Microsoft, > > anti-Capitalist attitudes ... let's simply acknowledge the truth. > I will point out Microsoft has/does ship several of our codecs, [...] Just to batter the other side of that point, our codecs are installed in games because it makes economic sense, not through some socialist ideology. We push to get users to communicate with vendors to make vendors see Ogg support as a value-added attribute. Then, their cost-benefit analyses will make supporting Ogg worthwhile. I would use Theora/Vorbis to stream video in my business because I don't need to purchase a copy of Microsoft products and this saves me money. Just because some people view capitalism as exploiting others for the sake of personal greed, doesn't make open source "anti-capitalistic" because it doesn't conform to that stereotype. It is precisely because open source makes capitalistic sense that it is so incredibly successful. Motorola isn't basing its new phones on Linux because it disagrees with the fundamental principles of the free market, but because the free market makes it a good idea. Some of open source's biggest benefactors are corporations (Google, IBM etc.) or people who have succeeded in capitalistic terms (Mark Shuttleworth). There are numerous good articles on the economics of open source, if you look for them. There are anti-capitalistic open source advocates, but to say that open source is anti-capitalistic by nature alienates a large number of the other advocates, users and developers. I'm not having a go, I'm making sure that the myth isn't propagated any further among those who casually visit the archives. Regards, Aaron