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Story: It's not the Gates, it's the bars

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pjc, you miss the point

The only cancer that has grown is the limitations placed on users by business not interested in competition, and the lack of real innovation that has happened in the IT industry for the last 20 years.

Computing grew out of cooperation, sharing, coolaboration, making ones work freely available to others so that others could build on your work, and that you could build further on their work. Without this free sharing, computers today would still occupy huge rooms and be horrible expensive things that only governments could afford.

Today, companies do as much as possible to prevent competition, the very seed that forces improvements in products, which is to the advantage of the user. Software Patents are part of this cancer.

You talk about Microsoft providing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Linux and Free Software, shared on the basis of GNU, has provided millions of jobs around the world, and made computing reachable for people who would otherwise have the financial means to get to it. These people get jobs because they have the possibility to learn something they otherwise would never have the opportunity to.

Microsoft is one big company, there are hundreds of thousands of small companies out there that have built their business based on the open sharing that Stallman has promoted. You can't simply discount these because they base their business on a different principle.

As for the big companies, Sun, IBM, and so on, they have been forced to change their entire business model, to provide cheaper hardware that supports more than just their own propretry OS. In fact, hardware prices from these manufactures has plummeted drastically. The competition that free software has brought in forced them to innovate, and to advance their technological offerings to customers, and to make their products compatible with the products from competing offerings. Their other option was to hold on to the old proprietary way of business, and die a slow, painful death.

Why are there less computing students? To lay the blame at the foot of free software is to be blind to a number of facts. Worldwide the number of IT students is sky rocketing. It's just not increasing in countries that restrict the use of software and and restrict users, in those countries it's decreasing. In other countries, like India, the IT student numbers are rocketing, and there free software is much more prevalent than proprietary software.

The IT bubble in the west burst a bit a few years ago, when managers realised that the future is not all in the internet, and not all in IT. There are other markets out there, and consumers don't just sit in front of computers, they do sports, go on holidays, visit friends, and for that you don't need IT. And as for your big mac argument, that's a comparison between chalk and cheese, read irrelevant.

IT will grow on both models, it's just that with the open source model on which computing was originally built is coming back because it can grow more productively and innovatively on this model.

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