Windows 10

[haraldo]

I'm not sure I'm following your freedom of choice statement. In the Linux community you can get freedom of choice about which company you have providing third-party support (like Suse or Redhat), but beyond that I'm not sure what the freedom factor is. There is freedom in open source world to take the source code and extend it in some way, but until those changes are accepted by whatever community is controlling the source you have code just as proprietary as anyone's, and you might be stuck porting your code to whatever future version's of the community's source code are being developed while you're waiting.

One could say that open source is a vehicle for some kinds of innovation, and there's probably a good case for that based on the evidence, but freedom still doesn't come to mind. Lower cost in the data center world probably does too.

You don't need your source code to be accepted to the community, according to GPL you have to make it available, but if you do changes to the Kernel and Linus doesn't accept it, you can still go on using it, and it doesn't make it proprietary.

The freedom is that if you need to make changes to the operating system to roll out a new service that gives you a business benefit .... You do have a freedom to do this .... Most companies don't need this exact freedom and for them, windows will be fine, no problems

 

[afterlife2]

Microsoft just announced today that not only will they be offering the new Windows 10 (set for a "summer" release), as a free update for current Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 users, they will also be giving it to users currently running pirated copies of their software.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2898803/microsoft-takes-extraordinary-step-will-give-pirates-free-windows-10-upgrade.html
this article suggests this is a way to re-engage with the Chinese market, where an estimated three-fourths of all installed software is pirated.

 

[rnatalli]

I was never a fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit liking some of the directions they're taking very recently.