Piestar

So the Internet’s version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were (allegedly) out in force again as free software day came and went again.  I certainly didn’t (luckily) see anyone that felt the need to press some crappy GNU/Linux distro into my hand while blathering about software ‘ethics’.  Maybe there are some advantages to living in a chavvy hell-hole of a town sometimes.

Anyway that’s not really the point.  I used to be a nearly full-blown freetard a long time ago.  I had the whole ‘hate the man’ thing down (Microsoft) and bought into the whole ‘by developers, for developers, lets cut out the corporate middle man’ movement.  This was before I had even really used Linux – but the concept seemed sound.  And how can a developer not fall for that idea – software utopia, plus never having to deal with anti-user crap like artificial limits and activation again!  But then I actually used it for an extended duration and moved into my ‘the idea is sound, but it just needs more work’ phase.  I believed with the concerted effort of like-minded people and by including designers, UI experts and artists it was only a matter of time.  The third phase was that it was a shame that a great idea was being ruined by a defensive community of non-developer, non-contributing idiots intent on scaring away anyone who didn’t believe it was already perfect.  At least I was partially right that time.

And finally, I am where I am now: It’s a bad idea to the point of being dangerous and it just won’t work anyhow.

Here’s the thing.  Nobody owns GPL’d code.  The code is free.  You are not.  For example you, as a user, have more freedoms when it comes to BSD licensed code – effectively you can do what you want with it, provided you provide credit.  GPL’d code on the other hand has a slew of limitations on what you can and cannot do and attaches a larger burden on you in terms of distribution of changes and source.  The code is more ‘free’ under the GPL.  By GPL’ing code you effectively say ‘nobody owns this, it belongs to itself’.  I can sell BSD code and deny you your ‘fundamental right’ to freely distribute it further.  I can also grant you the same right as the GPL.  The GPL simply ensures you cannot stop anyone from modifying and distributing.

The problem with the above is that it entirely negates ownership.  You cannot ‘own’ free software.  It doesn’t matter if you wrote it – it’s not yours.  As soon as you release software under the GPL you have no more right to it than any of the other 6 billion people on the planet.  It’s why FOSS advocates call closed source (distastefully) ’slavery’, as closed source software is owned and controlled by someone.

The ramifications of this are obvious – you can’t make money selling free software.  You can sell it, but so can everyone.  If you’ll need to sell 10,000 copies at £100 each to reclaim your investment and the kid in the local computer store will sell them for £5 to anyone that wants one then you’re simply never going to break even.  The whole ‘you can sell free software’ excuse is intellectually dishonest as you have to compete with people with no sunk or running costs.  The best you can do is put up an online tip-jar and rely on effectively begging – and I’ve yet to hear of that working well.

Effectively, what the GPL and the Free Software movement says, is that developers do not deserve to be compensated for their effort.  Unless they can manage to sell the first copy for £1,000,000 then there is no way to ever get paid for the time spent.  It simply can’t be done.  If you want to man a phone line, do email support, work as a call out technician, then you can (according to ’software freedom’) demand a fair hourly wage, but if you are a developer you can’t.  It’s ‘immoral’.  Simply on the basis that you cannot own code, thus can’t charge money for it.

The argument often made about the above is that businesses still need programmers.  Which is true.  But this is where the whole thing unravels fully.  I am a programmer – say I have an idea for a great new CMS tool*.  I now have two options:

1. Quit my job, rely on my family to put up with me for a few months while I spend 12hrs+ a day working on it.
2. Take my idea to a large company such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft or someone else like that.

As above, according to the ’software freedom’ camp if I picked option 1. as soon as I released it it would be mine no more.  The second I tried to charge money for it it would just be forked and given away.  Instead of relying on the future income I could have gained from selling it at launch to pay back the debts I would have no doubt incurred, and to fund new development, I would be forced to ‘get a job’.  Any development work would have to be done in evenings and weekends – and I would effectively be forced to decide between programming what I want, or my marriage.  Plus the software would progress more slowly as I would not have much time to devote to it.

Now with option 2. there is pretty much zero chance of getting taken up on my idea.  You don’t tell a business that you want to hire you what you are going to work on.  Unless you are really, really famous.  Chances are unless your surname is something like ‘Carmack’ you’re going to be writing the mundane stuff that they want you to do – not your own exciting ideas.

There are companies that are based around and heavily involved in free software.  Names include companies such as Red Hat, Mozilla, IBM, Canonical, Google, Novell etc and the one thing about these companies is that they are not in the software sales business.  Red Hat is in providing support and SLA’s for businesses and servers. IBM is similar to Red Hat – they sell ’solutions’.  Mozilla makes money from advertising for Google, Canonical is a billionaire’s plaything, Google sells advertising and Novell is just a slightly more pragmatic Red Hat.  You’ll never see a company such as Adobe adopt a FOSS business model as they are in the business of selling software.  I don’t imagine anyone can make the argument that Adobe can go FOSS and remain profitable with a straight face.

It’s the following realisation that made me realise what a disaster FOSS really is.  Free Software only benefits large companies and the rich.  It is almost impossible to be a developer and not work for ‘the man’ under the GPL.  Sure there are exceptions to every rule but the simple fact is you can’t be a developer unless you can get an alternate revenue stream.  Support is good, but not a lot of apps will require support and you don’t spend months programming to be forced to make money manning a phone line.  There are also the dual license options, but this is effectively shareware, and you are still making money selling closed source software.

If adhering to the GPL was a legal requirement then it’s not like software would all suddenly be free and open.  What would actually happen is that people would simply stop making software.  All the games available on Steam would not suddenly be free – they simply wouldn’t have been made in the first place.  I pay money for SmartFTP because it is the best FTP program I have ever used.  By paying money I help fund further development.  I am happy with this.

It’s not even like the mass piracy and commoditization of  music, as it’s not like developers can make money selling tickets at £50 a go to live shows.  The software itself is all you’ve got.

Now I simply don’t see how anyone who thinks pragmatically about a future in which the GPL is accepted as the way to distribute software can possibly support it as in reality the people it hurts the most are the very people that support it – individual developers.

* True story, I do.  I am working on it and plan to launch it in a few months.

Some Further Thoughts and Ugly Truths:

The most overlooked point with regards to software development is that it is generally the result of a few people sinking a large amount of time into it, not as a result of a lot of people doing a small bit.  You simply can’t throw developers at a project and expect it to flourish – it just doesn’t work.  If you want something well written and cohesive it’ll take a small, dedicated, team – not a large bunch of semi-skilled volunteers – not something that really happens in FOSS unless you are being funded by a rich 3rd party.

Capitalism, in a nutshell, is providing people what they want.  If you don’t provide it you don’t succeed.  If enough people don’t want it the provider can either improve and adapt, or die.  In the FOSS world you take what you’re given and have no right to complain.  Gimp is near useless and doesn’t even match the decade old Photoshop 5.0 yet people not using it will not spur on development.  There is simply no motivation to cater for a wide audience – if Gimp was a commercial product the company would have been bankrupt years ago but catering for your users needs is simply not important in the world of free software.  Free software is about developers scratching their own itch, not finding out what itch other people want scratched.

The bulk of FOSS development work is done by one of these people:

• Students, getting paid to learn.
• Unemployed, getting paid by the state.
• The Rich, resting on their laurels.
• Large companies, adding value to their other services.

Free software is categorically not made by these people:

• Software companies.

If it is name one.

Software development is hard.  It’s incredibly time consuming.  If most people truly appreciated the difficulty and time required to create a truly great piece of software I doubt they would have bothered.  It requires people with a true passion for development to make truly great software, and I personally find the fact that such people would be relegated to only doing what they love in their spare time, rather than as an actual job, disgusting.

And finally it is the software that is free, not you.  All this talk of ‘freedoms’ and ‘rights’ is utter crap – it’s not your freedom or your rights so the whole idea that commercial software is taking them is simply untrue.  If a developer wants to release something under a Libre license that is fine – but it should never be considered ‘ethical’ or expected for this to be the case and if you really want to make a case for your own ‘freedoms’ then the BSD license is far more appropriate candidate.

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Who would have thought a recode of an OS from the early 90’s would be generating such interest?  It certainly sounds quite interesting to be honest (despite the lack of wifi) and if I had more time I’d probably have a play with it.

When I heard about it I remembered this comment someone posted on an earlier post of mine in response to a discussion about not GPL’ing my stuff:

Kerberos,

Free software may not completely replace commercial software any time soon, but it will (and already has) made making money selling commercial software more difficult.

Sounds good, Until someone releases a GPL or BSD thing similar to what you make, meaning people who want to use for commercial purposes will simply skip you.

Which illustrates the source of 99% of the FOSS software that people use – clones. 

Linux is a clone of Unix.  Instead of taking the time to improve some of the cruft from the 70’s it’s all faithfully reproduced – warts and all.  Look in the repo’s and it’s exactly the same, hundreds of clones of classic games and the few original ones are largely gameplay copies.

I remember the announcement of Songbird on Slashdot, where it was hailed as an ‘iTunes Killer’.  Check it out, screenshot on the right.  Apart from a few cosmetic changes doesn’t it look exactly like iTunes.

The thing is the developers working on Linux, Songbird, Haiku and all the rest of these clones are not working on their vision for what they want to achieve, they are just faithfully copying something that exists already.  Once they reach feature parity, where do they go from there?  If they were truly passionate about creating software they would make their own software.

Since they are just copying someone else’s vision once they run out of things to copy they lack direction, motivation and ability – there is more to development than coding – and the projects generally just stagnate from this point on.

I am working on a custom CMS at the moment (as in the quote above) and it is nothing like anything that exists at the moment as it is based on what I want, not based on just copying an existing one – how many Mambo clones are out there now?  I have enough ideas for it to keep me occupied for years as I have a vision for what the final thing should be, and am working towards that vision.  Any clones will not have that, and so will largely be unable to move beyond the source of the copy.

As is the case with Haiku.  Once it reaches proper parity with BeOS, where is it going to go from there?  Are there any genuine innovations and improvements planned to bring it forwards in time?  I somehow suspect though, since the aim isn’t making a good, modern OS but rather creating a BeOS clone, there will never be any real tangible improvements beyond what the original Be team managed.  After all if these people had vision (and this goes for the FOSS community) they’d be making something original, rather than just making a carbon copy of something existing.

Linux = Unix Clone
BSD = Unix Clone
ReactOS = Windows Clone
Haiku = BeOS Clone

Take Windows 7.  If Microsoft had a working copy of Windows 7 to copy when they were developing it in the first place it probably would have been available ~2003.  Developing software is all about coming up with new ideas and concepts, trying them out and finding out what works. Since they didn’t have a working target to clean-room re-engineer they had to make mistakes, try new things and come up with their own ideas.

Sometime things simply don’t work in practice that worked on paper.  Sometimes you make an early decision that requires a lot of work when you realise it can be improved upon.  You can see the thought process by comparing Win 95 -> Win 98 -> Win 2000 -> Win XP -> Vista -> Seven.  Each one brings new ideas and concepts along with new problems that the successor tries to address.  Again if MS were just making clones and had a competitor’s copy of Windows 7 back in 2000 they’d have a working copy in a few years.  Development is much, much harder when you have to come up with your own ideas though.

My ultimate example of this is Tetris.  Any, even relatively low-skilled, programmer is generally capable of making a working copy of Tetris in under a day.  Yet if you told the same programmer to make an ‘Innovative block based puzzle game’ they would be at it for weeks, if they even managed to produce anything else at all.

So the easy bit is done for Haiku – cloning BeOS.  Now the question is are they up to the challenging bit of actually having their own ideas?

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Free Software is *not* the same as Open Source.

Open Source is simply providing software with the source code so the receiving user can modify it to suit their needs.

Free Software is having the ability to freely modify and (this is the key) distribute software they have received from a 3rd party.

Free Software is being *unable* to restrict what a 3rd party does with your software.

You can very easily have non-free Open Source.  In fact a large amount of software made, mainly custom stuff and most of what I do, is technically ‘Open Source’ – that is I am paid to to do it, and I give the client the source along with any binaries.  It is *not* Free Software though, as the client is unlikely to give it away.

For example a large amount of commercial web apps are Open Source in that you have access to the source code, but are not Free Software as you do not have the right to redistribute the source freely.

This is the main bone of contention between the Commercial and Free Software camps – it has nothing to do with source – which is a red herring – it has to do with control.  The main point of free software is to remove any and all control from the original developers and give it to the users – the software is owned by the community.  Supporters of the commercial model (obviously) have a problem with this as it makes making a business out of developing software impossible – If you sell support you are in the business of support, not software.  Free Software is fundamentally anti developer.

Personally I support Open Source, and plan on releasing my next project as a dual licensed Free Non-Commercial and pay for Commercial offerings.  You can use it for free and give it away if you do not use it commercially, and if you want to use it commercially you will be required to pay a license fee.  Which is perfectly reasonable but it is not ‘Free Software’ and would not be supported by the FSF.

Free Software is an ethical line for it’s supporters.  Non-free (as the example above) is considered immoral by supporters and according to the FSF I am unethical in my request for compensation for commercial usage.  According to the FSF doctrine I must relinquish all ownership over the code and give any user full source and distribution rights.  If I want to make money I should sell ’support’.

The thing is if (and many people suggest this) I was legally forced to make it ‘Free’ I would not even bother to make it in the first place.  In that world the job of ‘developer’ either would not exist, or would be relegated to a role in a huge corporation where you are told what to work on.  The small, independent software companies would be dead – and the software that they would have produced would not now be free, it just wouldn’t exist in the first place.  So instead of having the choice to pay money for something or not have it, you’d simply not be able to have it at all.  Not a situation I can support.

I think if people stopped thinking Free Software and Open Source are interchangeable terms, and that if more people found out what Free Software really is, and the implications, significantly less people would support it.

Update: I do not think that Free Software is bad, should be banned, or anything like that.  I believe it is up to the developer to choose how to distribute their software and that there is nothing wrong with closed source, commercial software.  It is up to the developer to choose the license, and the user to choose the software.  It’s all about choice.

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Apparently it’s all settled, thanks to the freetard analogy capabilities:

Don Whitbeck settles the question of “Linux has too many choices” once and for all with irrefutable logic:”Let’s just have one flavor of ice cream. How about vanilla? All that choice is bewildering. “

Or maybe not.  Ice cream is an end in itself.  A more realistic statement would be this:

Would you want 1,000 slightly different shaped tubs of ice cream all only able to fit in budget vanilla, or one tub that you could put any flavour you wanted in it?

I know which I would rather have.

An over reliance on analogy illustrates a weak argument – saying two things are in fact two other incredibly tenuously connected things and since they are better the original thing is better is intellectually dishonest.

A reliance on analogy just illustrates you don’t have any real point.  Analogy is only useful when who you are talking to is unable to understand the point in the current terms.  Using it when both people understand the subject fine is specious at best, lying at worst.

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So Adam King said he wouldn’t get a balanced response to this.   Since it’s his first post that, despite being woefully simplistic, doesn’t seem entirely like cut+paste trollage I thought I’d give a reply.

First up:

The UK has “free healthcare” in that when you go to a doctor, you don’t pay anything. Their services are financed by the government, through taxes.

Speaking as a resident of the UK I like our ’socialist’ healthcare.  It’s one of those things that a first world country simply should provide, alongside an Army, Police Force and Fire Service.  Either they are all socialist or none of them are.  I am not speaking from a ‘Socialism bad whaarrgarbbblll’ perspective here.

Why can’t this extend to software?

Because it doesn’t need to.  The problem you have concocted this plan to solve does not exist outside your head.  Medical bills can bankrupt even well off people through no fault of their own.  Windows is cheap, it’s not going to destroy families as they need to buy Windows.  Plus there are plenty of cheap offers for people if they look – Office for home users is significantly cheaper than for businesses.

Here’s a great and revolutionary idea – people pay money for the software they want.  That way you don’t make the poor even poorer subsidising the middle class and businesses demand for software – after all Microsoft already has socialist pricing for this very reason – you would make software more expensive.

Software is a purely capital expense. There is no problem reproducing something written in software. Why should dozens of ISVs exist that basically invent small variations of the same wheel? This is pointless.

To illustrate this point, consider this: Take 100 programmers and product managers, divide them into 20, and put them each in their own room, and tell each group to write an office suite.

-or- Take those same 100 people, and tell them to work together.

Which will result in a better product in the end? This is no contest.

There is one thing you didn’t think about in your proposal – Who says that the ‘ISG’s official OS is going to be Linux?  Who says that the release license is going to be the GPL?  As your example above  it is better to all unite and work on one thing rather than work on multiple developer-starved projects.  Which is obvious.

Linux is legendary for it’s fragmentation though.  The only thing that actually appears to only have one main version is the kernel itself, while for every other significant component there exist dozens of versions and forks.  The FOSS movement has proved itself unable to form any sort of cohesive force, settle on any standards or even write a stable API/ABI.  Software isn’t even compatible between distro versions, let alone cross distro compatible.  There is a good chance anything written now will be broken in a years time by someone changing the API for something again.  Compare this to Windows – or even BSD – where if you got some software made for Windows 95 there is a very good chance it’ll actually work on Windows 7.  Yet the FOSS crowd haven’t even got a standard package format (tar.gz, deb, rpm, portage, etc, etc) yet whinge that MS has their own document format.  Seriously, until the clusterfuck that is cross distro compatibility is fixed MS can have .doc and nobody has the right to say anything.

If in the very unlikely chance that the ‘ISG’ was actually created though I can bet you the OS base would not be Linux.  It might be BSD but I reckon the most likely contender would be the company with the most advanced technology, hardware compatibility and capabilities to handle a project of this magnitude – which would be Microsoft.  After all no country in the world would ever fund people who think that ‘Gimp’ is a good name for a piece of software.  They would go with the most established, professional, capable and proven group – a list which Linux is at the bottom of.

I see this as the real way forward for the software industry. Just like education: software is really important for our future, and is universally useful for almost every human fields of endeavor.

The problem with this is exactly the same problem with FOSS, which is coincidentally the same problem with all overly socialist and communist countries – you’ll have no competition.

The reason Photoshop is king of the hill, and Creative Suite is pretty much an industry standard, is not because Adobe are an evil monopoly, it is because they have been constantly striving to make the best software they can to gain their marketshare.  The thing with your ’solution’ is that once this magical socialist OS + software was made there would be no pressure to cater for their audience, no threats for failure, bugs and poor code.  Nothing new and inspiring would ever come along.  Microsoft are at their best when they have competition – IE sucked until Firefox, Office stagnated until OOo – which spurred MS to redo the whole UI.  The iPod and iPhone came from nowhere and set the bar ridiculously high for everyone else – without competition at best you would only ever get marginal improvements.  There would never be any radical leaps in usability, design and functionality as there would be no competition to spur it on.  I’ve already covered this with regards to Gnome and their entire failure to innovate for years – since there is no concern of going bankrupt, they have no real pressure to improve anything.

Gimp sucks, it’s unarguable, yet there’s never any effort to improve it.  Occasionally you hear of some half-assed attempt at fixing the GUI that never goes anywhere but why should they bother – it’s not like their job is riding on it’s success – so who cares if nobody uses it?

So in summary it’s:

• A solution seeking a problem.
• Overly expensive and unfair on the poor and the old.
• Will lead to worse quality software.
• Will almost certainly not be based on Linux or the GPL.
• Will cause hundreds of thousands of job losses.
• Is just a plain bad idea

Balanced enough for you?

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So I thought I’d use the new logo as both an educational resource on some of the most useful Photoshop tools, and also to take another swipe at Gimp as I really don’t think it gets quite as much abuse as it rightfully deserves.

In this example I will show how I quickly and easily, using modern productivity tools, created the logo for this site – and you’ll also notice that pretty much none of the tools I used are even in the pipeline in Gimp, let alone available.  And bear in mind I am a developer mainly, not a graphic designer.

Part 1: The Parts

Firstly create three new text layers – one with ‘pie’, one with ’st  r’ and one with a star – use the Wingdings font for this one (via charmap).  It is also advisable to put the ’st  r’ and the star in a layer group – there is a button that looks like a folder on the bottom of the layers palette – so that if you need to move, resize or otherwise transform the text you can apply the changes easily to everything in the group, plus collapse the group to treat it all as one object.  Gimp, obviously, lacks this feature.

Part 2 – Text Effects

Now I want a light black border on the text, a slight drop shadow (to bring it forwards) and a very slight inner glow to make it more visible on the page.  I have no idea how on earth you’d achieve this in Gimp, but thanks to Photoshop tools bordering on nearly a decade old, it’s easy with PS.  Simply right click on the text layer called ’st  r’ and select ‘Blending Modes…’.  You will get up a fun box for controlling the effects.  Use the following settings…

Drop Shadow: Black, Multiply, 75%.  2px distance, 0 spread, 3px size.
Inner Glow: Lighten, 12%, White.  100% choke, 1px size*
Stroke: 1px, black, outside, normal blend mode, 77% opacity.

* Inner and Outer glows can be used with 100% choke as a secondary stroke – set blend mode to normal.

The great thing about the blending modes on Photoshop is that you can tweak them afterwards – want to lessen the glow, try a different stroke etc.  no problem.  You can also alter the text and enlarge it, losing no clarity and not requiring you to redo everything.  Also, updates are done in real-time – you can see your drop shadow change and move as you change the settings.  Obviously with Gimp what was done in PS in a couple of minutes would take hours, plus you’d have to physically write down everything you did (all settings for plugins) as if you wanted to redo or adjust you’d have to start again otherwise.

All that is left now is to apply the same effect to the star, and to the ‘pie’.  Which is just a case of right clicking on the ’st  r’ layer, selecting ‘Copy Layer Style’, then right clicking on the other two text layers and selecting ‘Paste Layer Style’.  Just set the star and the ‘pie’s text to orange and you’re done!

Part 3 – The Pie

All that is left is adding a piece of tasty pie!  High quality artwork can usually be sourced from someone like istockphoto.com where for a very reasonable price you can choose between thousands of relevant, high-quality images for the one that fits.  Or if you are a Gimp user you can pick from the dozens of amateur crap at somewhere like sxc.hu – If there is no money to be made, where is the motivation to do excellent (costly) work for free after all?

After choosing the right image, import it into your document, convert it to a smart object – smart objects allow you to resize down, up and rotate an image without losing the quality of the original – position it, add a bit of drop-shadow and voila!  You’re done.  Unless you’re using Gimp in which case you’d probably still be trying to get the first round of drop-shadows done.

Summary

Total time taken, about 30 minutes, and that included picking the image.  If I was using Gimp how long would creating the above to a similar level of detail take (including experimentation and tweaking)?  I am guessing several hours minimum.  That’s the thing about Gimp – it has the complexity of Photoshop and the power of Paint.

Imagine a programming language that lacked arrays.  Sure you can work around it but it would certainly not be fun.  That is what using Gimp is like – even basic, stupid, taken-for-granted mundane stuff that Photoshop has had for over a decade is, at best, ‘coming soon’.

Gimp has no ‘hidden depths’.  Mastering it will not enable you to compete with Photoshop.  It is not ‘the same, only different’, it is not ‘catching up’.  Not all people need all the options, sure, but even then you might as well go with something that is actually easy to use – rather than the colossal disaster that is Gimp’s UI.

Also, what is really, really, really pathetic is the fact that Gimp is a flagship in the FOSS world that has been around for years, yet a (iirc) student project, Paint.NET, pretty much matches it on functionality, and thrashes it on speed and ease of use.

I suppose the one good use that Gimp has is that it makes filtering the ‘full-freetard’ hopeless causes out from the sadly deluded – anyone that insists that Gimp doesn’t suck when presented with the facts is a gonner.

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It’s funny how the ‘capitalism is evil’ crowd hates on Microsoft so much for having what is essentially a socialist approach to sales.  Something you’d think they’d be all over in approving of (or at least not have it in the top-10 of the talking points list).

Of course what I am referring to is the much maligned 6+ different version of Windows.  Obviously there is no actual real difference between Home Basic and Ultimate, apart from a large amount of money.  There are also little real technical differences between Server (prices from ~£700) and Home Premium (around £70).

Yet you have all these versions of essentially the same thing for wildly differing prices?

The reason for this is not everyone can afford Ultimate.  Yet every version of Windows is Ultimate, essentially.  So Microsoft has created a tiered system so that people who do not want to pay for Ultimate don’t have to.  They disable some token features that you probably won’t need really as justification for this – Ultimate only has Bitlocker I think but TrueCrypt is free.  So every time someone who feels they have to have the latest and greatest buys Ultimate they, by aggregate, lower the price for you buying Home Premium.

The differences with Server are even more massive – you are looking at a near 10x markup from MS for what is essentially removing arbitrary limits from Windows (booo hisss!) but if they didn’t limit the desktop editions like they do then guess what – there wouldn’t really be a market for Server.  And you would be paying significantly more for your consumer editions if this were the case.

Personally I like to have choice and sure the artificial limits suck, but I’d rather they were in place and I could pay for what I need rather than being forced to pay top dollar for stuff I neither need nor want.

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I may even get around to putting some new posts up soon too!

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