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To: TTOSBT who wrote (3197)	7/14/1999 3:13:00 AM
From: Daniel Shaffer	Respond to of 5102

Microsoft the Liberator? "Now the way I see it Microsoft has probably (however indirectly) given many more individual's freedom than Linux to date - ironically due to it's dominance. The power of the free world never ceases to amaze!" You are confusing issues here. Freedom doesn't mean much if you have no real choice or options to choose from. OS licensing fees may be a trivial expense to large US corporations, but they are impossibly expensive for universities in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China where the average employee earns $100 per month or less and and it is a struggle just to keep their doors open. For them, LINUX is a Godsend. This is not a question of the "free world" versus something else. Even in the Soviet Union, the upper echelons of the Party (the "nomenklatura") enjoyed considerable freedom to travel, shop in special stores featuring western luxury goods, enjoy upscale housing, etc. But face it: if you want to run the latest versions of most software, you have no freedom to choose a non-Microsoft operating system. You have about as much choice as a shopper in a North Korean state-owned store who has a choice of one brand of inferior toothpaste.