Possibilities for commercial software?

[Ian Stirling]

Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:
> On Saturday 27 January 2007 17:23:14 Renaissance Man wrote:
> 
>> It's not a matter of "should." A person DOES have the freedom to run
>> proprietary software on their open phone if they choose, but that
>> freedom, if acted on, has consequences (called an externality in
>> economics). 


>> And that consequence is that the more people who do it 
>> the more reliant on non-free software free software becomes, and the
>> more reliant free software is on un-free software the less free the
>> whole system becomes: meaning, when you look at the whole picture,

> That is not following from people using non free software on a system. If I 
> chose to use TomTom on my Neo, nothing gets any less free than it was before. 

And if people who would not have bought the phone without tomtom - or an 
equivalent free app, now buy it as they can install tomtom on it, the 
market as a whole gets more free, compared to the other phone they may 
have bought that runs some flavour of windows or symbian, or ...

And that person now can recommends it to their friends, because it does 
what they want and doesn't crash, when they would not have done, and the 
platform grows.

And now the platform is larger, and may attract more people to develop a 
free tomtom clone.