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Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

Posted by timothy on from the kiss-babies-and-hand-them-cds dept.

Waldo Jaquith writes: "I'm a long-time advocate and user of open source and free software and, as of this morning, I am a candidate for the Charlottesville, VA (USA) City Council. Naturally, I see lots of areas in Charlottesville's IT infrastructure (as well as potential areas of expansion) where Linux and various free software projects would be ideal. But can I make that a talking point while campaigning? How do I make that concept accessible and interesting to 40,000 citizens?"

1 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Savings. by Matt2000 · · Score: 2, Flamebait


    Depends what the potential savings are to your constituents. If you can present open source software in concrete terms as in "Ditching Microsoft will pay for one more school per year in our city" then perhaps people will listen.

    Otherwise you'll have exactly one extra vote, from RMS.

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