Subject: essay

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 22:55:51 +0300

Hi lads (and lassies),

As some of you already know, sometimes I get a "juk" into my brain, and
I decide to do something weird, and go about doing it in full steam (until
I run out of steam ;)). No, I'm not talking about supporting Palestenian
(059 area code) cellphones on my sendsms script (those who subscribe to
linux-il will understand the joke) :)

This week I decided to write my own Free Software manifesto. It's an
essay about what I think are the benefits of free software to our society.
I am hoping that it will provide some fresh insights about issues that have
not been discussed enough in my opinion (besides the usual jive of "free means
freedom, not 'not costing money'"). I'm planning to put it on my homepage,
and if enough people like it maybe I'll send a note to linux-il (and here)
about it.

Anyway, now I'm doing the final editing on it, and I want what I write to be
based on facts (and with hyperlinks to these facts), not pure theory. But I
still having a few points I'm not satisfied on the level of "proof" I have
for, and I would like to find some more hard facts (rather than FUD) about
these issues. So I was wondering if anyone here knew anything about the
following questions. Thanks!
I am looking for facts only (preferably in the form of pointers to web-sites),
not opinions or musings. I already have enough of the latters in my essay :)

1) I am looking for case-studies of community centers (or public libraries,
   schools, or other community non-profit establishments) using free software
   to lower their costs and provide better service to a relatively-poor
   community. Case-studies anywhere in the world will be great.

2) I am looking for statistics (hard facts, not guesses) on how much a typical
   shareware author makes (or made) from registration payments. I'm not
   talking about the 5 most popular products of the decade (pkzip, winzip,
   etc.) but about more typical examples. ASP (the Association of Shareware
   Professional) just has guesses - and with all due respect my guesses are
   just as good as theirs.

3) I am looking for hard facts comparing tax rates between various countries
   in the world (e.g., what percentage of an upper-middle-class family's income
   goes to the total of income tax, VAT, customs, local taxes, and other
   taxes, in various countries). In particular, I want to confirm a hunch I
   have that taxes in the US are one of the lowest in the western world
   (I'm not talking about OPEC countries, in which there are no taxes!).

4) How much money goes from a typical computer owner (who is NOT a pirate)
   to commercial software (counting also the prices hidden in the price
   of the computer that comes with Windows)? How much does Windows cost for
   different people (private person? educational institution? etc.)? How
   much does MS-Word typically cost? Does anybody knows a site with such
   price quotes or statistics?

Thanks, and may the source be with you!

P.S. A draft of the essay is ready, so if anyone wants a sneak preview of
it (and if they promise to give me comments about it), please email me
privately.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, May 24 2001, 3 Sivan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |(On the back of a VW Beetle) Don't honk,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |I'm peddling as fast as I can.

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From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 May 2001 10:28:10 +0300

>    community. Case-studies anywhere in the world will be great.

Did you try any advocacy sites? Type "Linux advocacy" into Google, or
just start with http://www.linuxadvocacy.org. Any of that stuff is
likely to be just as biased as the recent Microsoft documents about
the cost of Linux, of course.

>    (I'm not talking about OPEC countries, in which there are no

One should be careful about such statistics. I don't know obviously
what your intention is, but it is very difficult to compare such
things for a score of different reasons. Different governments provide
different services for the taxes they collect. You might look at some
statistics and see that income tax in country A is lower than income
tax in country B, but in fact local taxes are not taken into account.
Whoever publishes such statistics, be it governments (in fact, maybe
one way to go about it is to visit the web pages of the "interesting"
finance ministries and try to gather your own data, but that's a *big*
project) or researchers, usually have their own agendas, and the data
(let alone the statistics) are likely to be biased. E.g. I did a quick
Google search, and one of the top links was the Japanese MOF page,

http://www.mof.go.jp/english/zei/report2/zc001c02.htm.

- the data are for '97, and heaven knows what it means, besides making
Japan tax reform look nice. Again, it's not what you want, I think -
it's probably income tax, not including local taxes, sales taxes, VAT,
capital gains, specific item taxes (fuel comes to mind, which is a
much bigger deal in the US than elsewhere, by the way), corporate
taxes (passed right on to the consumers, of course) that are difficult
to track transparently, customs, etc. Another diagram is

http://www.mof.go.jp/english/zei/report2/zc001c07.htm

- with "tax burden" not defined precisely. US looks better than UK or
Germany, but worse than France or Japan.

You will need to compare the actual distributions rather than 
the average or median) tax rates. You will have to do a lot of work
just figuring it out, even if someone dumps the data on you.

Maybe our own MOF will be of help, e.g.

http://www.mof.gov.il/hachnasot/state1/98217_16.htm

- but the data are a few years old ('95-'97).

I checked the Penn World Tables quickly, but didn't find any obvious
tax comparisons. Also,

http://www.estv.admin.ch/data/sd/e/inter/inhalt.htm

looks promising, but I haven't checked the docs.

Try to search for "international comparison of tax burden" or
something of the kind. And be skeptical.

>    price quotes or statistics?

AFAIK, MS prices are very different in the US and elsewhere in the
world, so be careful using US or other quotes.

> Thanks, and may the source be with you!

And the data!

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
If it ain't broken, it hasn't got enough features yet.

---

From: Adi Stav <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 00:17:46 +0300

On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 10:28:10AM +0300, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
...snip...
> something of the kind. And be skeptical.
...snip...

What about the CIA factbook? I haven't looked at it for tax information
specifically, but it's been of use to me in the past.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 May 2001 13:01:28 +0300

Nadav, maybe this story

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/29/0217253&mode=thread

will be useful for your essay?

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 13:21:42 +0300

> will be useful for your essay?

Thanks. It's a good point, and people also gave me other pointers to other
deficiencies of non-free software (usually, Microsoft). However, it doesn't
exactly fit the framework of my current essay, because I'm trying to
concentrate on problems that non-free software *must* have, by virtue of
it being non-free. Non-free software does not *need* to be buggy (I'm sure
you can find examples of non-free software that is not buggy, as well as
free software that is), and does not *need* to use unethical marketing methods
like changing your format every year (like MS-Word and forces you to upgrade
all the time - nobody I know actually upgrades for the new features!): for
example, you don't need to get a new version of photoshop just because they
change the JPG format all the time ;). But perhaps a future essay will deal
with those issues ;)

By the way, I hope I'll be able to release the essay (at least suitable
for local viewing (linux-il, hackers-il)) in a day or two.

In the meantime, I recommend people with free time to listen to RMS's speech
from yesterday at NYU: http://lrw.net/impacts/session9/session.html. It's
60 minutes + 20 minutes of questions, and the (relatively low quality, but ok)
RealAudio is only 4MB long, so it's easy to download. [but note that RealAudio
is not actually free software, so using it to hear stallman's lecture is
sacrilege - but an Ogg version of the lecture or a transcript are not yet
available]

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Wednesday, May 30 2001, 8 Sivan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |It is better to be thought a fool, then
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 00:26:47 +0300

On Sat, May 26, 2001, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] essay":
>...

I got buried in all those statistics, and I still don't know if I can safely
say that the US taxes are relatively low.
http://www.mof.gov.il/hachnasot/state1/98217_16c.htm
Seems to suggest so in terms of tax (I presume total tax) relative to GDP:
U.S. has 28%, while, for example, Israel has 40%, UK has 34%, Sweden 51%,
France 44%, germany 40%, etc.

I give up. I will use the following sentence in my essay, hoping that I'm
not to wrong: "...in the USA, where tax rates are among the lowest in the
western world". I will release the essay later tonight, so that you can
see the entire context.

Thanks for the data!
	Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Friday, Jun  1 2001, 10 Sivan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Life is what happens to you while you're
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |busy making other plans. - John Lennon

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From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 Jun 2001 14:45:14 +0300

> France 44%, germany 40%, etc.

This presumably means that the US has a proportionately smaller
government, and more things are delegated to private enterprise
(health care - by far the biggest money sink in Western countries,
comes to mind). It does not necessarily mean anything else.

> western world". 

Intuitively, this is fair.

> I will release the essay later tonight, so that you can
> see the entire context.

Looking forward to it...

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 15:14:14 +0300

> comes to mind). It does not necessarily mean anything else.

Yes - that's exactly the angle I was aiming at: that people in the US (or
at least their politicians) prefer to have lower tax rates and pay for some
of the things privately. I wasn't trying to imply if it's bad or good - just
that increasing tax rate in order to provide more services for the poor is
a red flag (pun intended) for some people in the U.S.

> > I will release the essay later tonight, so that you can

It's on http://nadav.harel.org.il/essays/lfe.html. Have a look :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Sunday, Jun  3 2001, 12 Sivan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |If I am not for myself, who will be for
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |me? If I am only for myself, who am I?

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 Jun 2001 15:26:07 +0300

> It's on http://nadav.harel.org.il/essays/lfe.html. Have a look :)

Yeah. I kill duplicate mails and news items, so I first saw - and
replied to - to your posting to hackers-il, and then saw the 
announcement on linux-il... ;-)

I'll have a look later today, I hope.