Thru out the years I have slowly moved over to open source freeware for many if not most of my programs on the computer. I have been lucky enough to find open source freeware that handles what a paid program did for me in most cases. Even Microsoft Office no longer occupies space on my hard drive as I use alternatives such as Openoffice and Google Docs. Hell, I can't even remember the last time I used IE.

Of course it's always about money. God forbid someone would want to provide something for free. I often question why some small software developers even charge $5 or $10 for the programs they make when there are often many free alternatives that work just as good if not better in some cases. I understand peoples need to want money to get the things they like but I tend to appreciate more those who ask for donations or no money at all as they tend to have the concept of wanting to use their skills to better our society as oppose to profit from it.

I'm not against people making money, but if you got something that can be found for free while your product is very cheap, why sell it? The more open source freeware we have, the less likely someone will make software based on the idea to make money, making them put out incomplete, bug filled software just to get you to buy it sooner to avoid loses for every day that goes buy that they are not selling the product. But that's just my opinion.

That's a common misconception about Open Source.

If you need support, you can buy it from Red Hat, Oracle, Canonical and thousands of other vendors. This is probably better than the support you'd get from closed source vendors, because you can both see the product you're using in it's entirety, i.e. no man behind the curtain.

So the process is more transparent and thus valuable to the consumer.

The actions in the article are borderline hilarious.

Sure you can buy support. That's why Linux is the industry standard....oh maybe not. One needs to ask why that is. You did hit the nail on the head though in one respect, show me a big company, especially a government, that wants transparency of their system. Any knowledgeable Linux hobbyist on the street will have a copy of your basic (or more) code (not that some can't get their hands on MS code, I've just seen many more putter with the various Linux flavors). I'm not knocking any of the multitude of flavors of open source Linux, or the pay for versions of Linux and Unix available, I am of the opinion there are some very good ones. The difference between an single MS and a Linux administrator in these parts is about 25K+ a year, and thats just for servers, their client PC's still run Windows. Now imagine how many an entire govt. entity (like Indonesia) would require.

 I can't comment on the paid support or its cost, since I've never personally used it, but if you have a truly open-source system (servers and clients) that fewer people are trained to operate or work on it, the bigger the $$$upport dollars are and maybe even regular employees that may never have seen let alone used it before. There is a reason why companies like Oracle and Sun MicroSystems, make big (maybe not MS big) dollars while have a (much) smaller piece of the pie compared to MS. Choice is great though.

The RIAA are a bunch of Nazis. Reacting that way over a suggestion just demonstrates their fascist tendencies.  Their statement suggests that open source software wouldn't be the "best solutions" for Indonesia.  Just because something costs a lot of money and is covered by thousands of patents doesn't make it the best. Having dealt with Microsoft's "support" in past jobs I can tell you that Red Hat or Canonical's support is vastly superior and more effective at problem resolution.

Open source politics, now there's a damn good idea!