Re: just who are these people?

["Eric M. Hopper" <hopper@omnifarious.mn.org>]

On Tue, Dec 14, 1999 at 10:56:42AM -0500, Lewis A. Mettler wrote:
> 
> Bundling with a monopoly product is illegal.  That is a separate
> determination than fairness and harm.
> 
> Bundling is in fact inherently unfair to consumers and harmful.
    .
    .
    .
> That power can be supported if all tire dealers in town likewise bundle
> burger meat with their tires.  In that case, you will be buying the meat
> regardless of your taste, religion or eating habits, right?  Either that
> or do without tires.  So if all tires are bundled with meat (operating
> systems with networking technology) then you are still forced to buy
> both regardless of your needs and harmed because of it.  In this case,
> no one tire company has a monopoly but together they can either fix
> price or fix products by bundling.  Oligopolies and cartels do this as a
> matter of course.
> 
> Again, bundling harms consumers.  And, it harms them all.

	I disagree.  Bundling when people have no choice is harmful, but
otherwise its harmless, and can often benfit the consumer.  No consumers
I know of would choose to buy each individual instruction of a program
and assemble it themselves.  A very, very tiny minority of consumers
might choose to buy a program an individual object module at a time and
link it themselves.

	I'm going to pick Linux here because it's what I'm the most
familiar with...

	I would put forth that, because of the nature of Open Source,
Linux is the product that is most likely to be distributed in a fashion
that is consistent with the needs of its consumers.  If a bundle
includes too much, someone will make a bundle that includes a smaller
amount of stuff because they either won't want to deal with the hassle
of having all that stuff, or because they want to run it in an
environment in which excess baggage is unacceptable.  The Linux Router
Project is a good example of this.  So are various embedded system
distributions of Linux.

	There are hardly ANY Linux distributions that do not include
bundled networking technology.  The one that I think may not is designed
for embedded systems in an embedded controller environment, and it evens
comes 'bundled' with the device drivers for the serial port.

	People WANT networking technology bundled with their OS.  If
they didn't, Linux wouldn't largely come with bundled networking
technology.  Someone would make a bundle that didn't have it, and it
would be distributed with that.  But, since people largely don't WANT an
OS without embedded networking technology, it isn't going to happen.

	If there's all this harm from bundling, why are people so happy
that Linux distributors like RedHat exist?  After all, their _MAIN_
function is bundling.

> Read the findings of facts. Or, use your intelligence.

	The findings of fact are about Microsoft's behavior.  They're
about the behavior of a monopolist.  The whole bundling argument changes
drastically when the bundler holds a monopoly on one of the products in
the bundle.

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
Its name is Public Opinion.  It is held in reverence. It settles everything.
Some think it is the voice of God.  Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet
broke a chain or freed a human soul.     ---Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.mn.org  http://omnifarious.mn.org/~hopper) --