Joshua Allen Holm

I can't say that my open source story is as interesting as the (as I write this) 35% of respondents who were in the room when the term "open source" was coined, but I've been using what we now call open source software since before the term was coined. Back in 1996, I started experimenting with different OSes. I bought <a href="http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?page_id=132">OS/2 Warp 4</a> when it came out, and then, very shortly after, bought one of the <a href="http://www.redhat.com">Red Hat Linux</a> retail box sets (it was for one of the 4.X releases, but I can't remember which one exactly.) I've been using Linux ever since. During college (1998-2002), I bought the complete collection of distros from <a href="http://www.cheapbytes.com/">cheapbytes.com</a> every 6 months or so, and played around with all of them. In grad school (2003-2004) I bounced between the early releases of <a href="http://www.fedoraproject.org">Fedora Core</a> and <a href="http://www.slackware.com/">Slackware</a> (plus <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html">Knoppix</a> as a live cd). Nowadays, I use Fedora as my main OS with two <a href="http://www.debian.org>Debian</a> virtual machines (one for <a href="http://koha-community.org/">Koha</a> and one for <a href="http://www.open-ils.org/">Evergreen</a>) and a <a href="https://www.centos.org/">CentOS</a> virtual machine as a development web server. Using open source software lets me do the things that I want, but I'm just a user and advocate (who occasionally submits bug reports and very minor fixes.) I'm sure other people have much more interesting stories to share.

Record companies might not have lowered their prices on albums, but digital distribution has caused there to be a shift away from having to purchase a whole album to being able to purchase just the tracks you wanted for $0.99 each. Many ebooks on Amazon.com are priced in between the MSRP for the hardcover and the paperback and come out at the same time as the hardcover, so going digital would save the consumer money.

Perhaps you're right in saying it is "unrealistically optimistic", after all these are the publishers who think they actually need to put out new editions of Algebra textbooks every few years, but things <em>can</em> change. For example, digital only textbooks from the publishers would result in a new sale with every purchase (there would be no used book market). This would be a change in the market. Would it, in isolation, be in the favor of the consumer? Maybe, or maybe not (honestly, for this particular change, probably not.) But quality open textbooks would provide competition and change the market. I've already taken several courses where the textbook was made freely available online by the author (e.g., Peter Baker's <a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html">The Electronic Introduction to Old English</a>.) This saved me money while still providing me with something that could rightly be called a cohesive textbook (as opposed to the instructor having to take the time to reinvent the wheel using a hodgepodge of other sources.)