[Fsfe-ie] The cost of proprietary software

[Ian Clarke]

Since most software is produced by non-Irish companies (even while many 
of them may have their European headquarters in Ireland), this could be 
framed as a balance of trade issue - meaning Irish money going into the 
coffers of foreign companies.

If course, this argument is complicated by the fact that most large 
foreign software companies have their international headquarters in 
Ireland.

Ian.

On 21 Jan 2005, at 10:02, Harry Tormey wrote:

> Well you could still do some sort of study to illustrate how difficult
> (expensive) it can be to extract data locked into a propritory system. 
> I
> will be doing something along these lines for my mothers company over
> the summer.
>
> I am sure their are lots of examples of big companies in Ireland having
> to fork out an arm and a leg in order to move data off of their old
> legacy systems. I think this is an area worth looking at.
>
> -Harry
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 08:57:47AM +0000, Aidan Delaney wrote:
>> On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 15:30 +0000, Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
>>> Now I'm no economist, but an interesting thought just occured to me.
>>>
>>> How could one estimate the negative effect of proprietary software 
>>> licensing
>>> to the Irish economy?
>>>
>>> It would be interesting to be able to claim on a brochure that 
>>> "Proprietary software costs the Irish ecomomy ??? Million Euros per 
>>> year" or something.
>> I don't think that this is a good approach as it does not emphasise 
>> the
>> real advantages of Free Software.
>>
>> The real advantages of Free Software are not the lack of an up-front
>> licencing fee but the fact that _you_, as an individual or company, 
>> own
>> your data.  The costs of proprietary software are not licences but the
>> cost of reclaiming the data in thirty years time from an undocumented
>> legacy format.
>>
>> In fact it is probably legal to charge a "per-seat licence" for Free
>> Software.  RedHat provide a per-seat service if you don't copy their
>> software.  You are free to copy and distribute their software but they
>> then will not provide support to you.
>> -- 
>> Aidan Delaney   email: adelaney at cs.may.ie
>>                 web:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney
>>                 gpg:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney/public_key.asc
>
>
>
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