A “PC world ” note

Two days back I bought the latest edition of PC World computer magazine. Since they would be completing 1 year in India, they had lot of free goodies with this month’s issue, Including 6 free booklets and a DVD with 12 software worth Rs 24,000 (596.12 $) ; FREE.

They also had this neatly published at the back of the cover in which the magazine came(see below) – that they are giving these softwares, costing so much, just free with the magazine. Great!!

But it made me wonder, whether anyone one of us really bother to see the value/cost/effort behind any one the free and open source software that we use and those that are taken for granted …..

Consider the software that we use daily including the Firefox, GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and java and thousands other such software;including the Apache, which powers most of the websites(66 million of them- source:netcraft) that you visit. People rarely publicize about the value and power of these software.

Imagine one of the computer magazines(substitute your favorite magazine here) decides to give away Vista with their magazine!!(I know its never going to happen!) and consider how much they would advertise, publicize to let everyone “know” that they are giving Vista with their magazine.
Now consider this, imagine how much this same magazine would publicize/advertise if they decide to give out a cool new Linux distribution with their magazine….

I think you get my picture, a stark contrast between the free world of open source /free softwares and that of proprietary software – In my humble opinion, one of the main issues that needs to be addressed.

Share your thoughts here.

As a side note, i decided to add a list of “Top 5 Free/Open source Applications” in my blog.