Comment 311 for bug 1

"If I am paying I would choose something that is functional out the box and MS delivers."

Actually most people would argue that if you want to pay for proprietary software, Apple delivers far better than MS ;)

"this is a choice and people have the choice to continue to use MS or not"

How is it a choice when people can't easily buy a prebuilt system locally without an OS or with a free OS preinstalled? ("Observe that a majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.")

Sure, people can choose to download and install Firefox, but you don't usually see it preinstalled. If Firefox was preinstalled on all Windows computers, how many people would go out of their way to install IE7? (not many I think) The same thing with VLC or OpenOffice.org or the GIMP, etc. etc. even though those all exist for Windows; preinstallation of proprietary software on retail computers is a barrier to usage of FOSS.

Fortunately, even with this barrier to overcome, the message is getting out; as per http://www.xitimonitor.com/fr-fr/technique/firefox-mars-2007/index-1-1-3-77.html nearly a quarter of all Europeans using the internet are using Firefox! (with a high of 44.5% in Slovenia :)

And once they're using Firefox on Windows, its not a big leap to using Firefox on Linux... of course, if they can find a computer to buy with preinstalled Linux that is.