Is it really "Free"?

I was reading a post on the ODF as a ISO standard from Digg. Checking out the comments, I’m really shocked to find that there’s a lot of hatred toward large corporations by really closed-minded people.

“Glad ODF was adopted over Microsofts implementation, there was a big fuss over this at the last Linux World. Now things can move forward as planned. though knowing microsoft, they will continue with their standard and screw the ISO and any other organizations standards just like they do with IE and everything else. =/”

-First yay for ISO for picking ODF, then boo to ISO. Very contradicting.

“ODF = Open Source != corporate mentality.”

We have a bundle tool that has a ton of open source tools we use. Microsoft is supporting the ODF, so what’s the complaint?

As a small worker bee in a large financial institution, I need the company to have proprietary products and services to help me pay my bills. I haven’t seen the open source community hiring lately with good pay, have you? Some companies even sponsor and support the open source community, so what’s the big complaint? Money? Pride? I don’t get what drives some people into complete hatred of corporations, maybe some…but I have bills to pay…

As for the friendly companies like Google, rather than charging us monetarily (is that even a word?), they take in data about us, statistics, things we do, etc. Ayende discusses this a bit. This is just the other Big Brother with candy and treats. I’m not knocking on Google, their tools and “free” stuff is awesome, but I guess I’d rather be a little bit more careful about what “free” really is.

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