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There were persistent rumors it will be free for personal use. I tend to believe those, Microsoft has to make this move, giving it away only for student does not seem to work anymore, they need to push windows and office to the home user in order to pressure his employer to give him the same things at work.
I really doubt that they'll actually be doing that. Student can already get it for free through the appropriate programs.
They are coming with a $7 version, it seems: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2867542/microsoft-touts-7-per-user-monthly-pricing-for-windows-subscriptions.html
Seems enterprise though.
Eventually, they will have to, a stripped down version, perhaps, but which will run any app and game. If they do not, their ecosystem will continue to shrink. it is also unenforceable, the countless "piracy protection" schemes only produced more botnets instead of actually forcing people to pay, many cannot, but still can get an android phone and while they will not pay for apps, will still count in the numbers within the ecosystem.
The investors will get it, yes, MS is king in the enterprise sector, but even that is slowly melting away, windows and dos were successful because most programs were for them and especially games, but with the advent of mobile devices with games, most kids and women switched to those except the heavy games which need the latest video cards and all, but that will mean those cards will get more and more expensive, while the mobile devices will become cheaper and cheaper and more powerful even in the 3d arena, eventually shaving off even more market share. If they will not switch to free stripped down versions for home users, the market will shrink to half in only a few years.
GPUs actually do not become more expensive - They become cheaper as they provide more power each 1-2 years for the same prices.
Adobe's tools continue to be light years ahead of free versions.
I've never heard anyone seriously argue that Blender is equivalent to the major commerical 3D packages.
Oracle's DB has a galaxy of features MySQL/Pg are not close to having.
Not many free games that are as good as the paid ones, are there?
Etc.
FOSS is mostly about about reimplementing/cloning commercial software. It's not like OpenOffice invented the spreadsheet.
That whole section has nothing to do with software licensing and cost.
And likewise, ARM and Intel are two commercial, closed source competitors. Yes, ARM's evolution made Intel sit up, but is nothing to do with software licensing. That's just normal competition.
Your post sort of ran off the rails into freedom, civil liberties, Romanian democracy, etc. We were discussing software licensing/cost.
This ^ brings tears in my eyes, very well said.
Commercial softwares charge for a reason. Either they are simply better, or they come with commercial support service.
E.g.
Adobe Collection -> Better.
Redhat Enterprise Linux -> Support.
And Linux is also unnecessary to be free of charge. The free indicates freedom and open source, not that you can't make profit. You can, for example, RHEL.
And what i wrote is related to that. many people base their purchases on more than just a few extra features, some are even programming their own which cannot be found in any commercially available product, hence the progress of FOSS and these days a lot of people fear the backdoors which open them up to hacks and snooping.
Of course paid for versions must offer something extra, of course the free ones are a little behind, if you are a professional, you need sometime features that most people do not need, for example in the video editing, it is absolutely normal to have someone who makes those features at very high prices for the few that need them.
On the other hand, without the free versions the others would have been of lower quality although not sure if more expensive (if everyone has to buy them, they would probably be cheaper, if we are to follow the market, but as we know, monopolies do not act like that, so the answer is not easy to guess). Windows was extremely low quality, there was a time when any linux distro would have been more stable and include more basic tools, competition from both open and non-open OSes forced Microsoft to get their act together and instead of inventing SCO style attacks on Linux, spend more money on QA. There are still many cases where FOSS tools are better and more stable than their counterparts, not only Adobe makes video editing software, and some of the "competitors" are literally frauds selling non-working almost products for even the basic functions. As for imaging and checking disks, the FOSS tools are either better or about the same as the top of the range paid for ones.
That is true now. It was helped by the BC craze too. However, as less and less people will play heavy games on PCs, the market will shrink, it is already shrinking, leading to higher prices due to losing some of the advantages of scale economies. Of course, the fabs will continue to shrink the dies due to the advances of the market in other sectors and this will benefit anything that uses something like that, however, in the long run, the pace of innovation will slow down and the prices will go up due to dwindling demand. And this is because of the ARM licensing model, if Intel really wishes to keep up will need to use a similar approach and they will probably be forced by Microsoft and the likes which stand to lose from the shift towards ARM. Simply subsidizing the CPU for mobile devices will not work, but, on the other hand, if they open up like ARM will probably mean their end, at least the end of big profits, so, I do not know what will happen.