Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

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?"

Comments

Re:Simple: "Show me the money?"

[Osty]

Find a way to lower, or at least not increase, taxes. Open source solutions are free. Maintenance of such systems, contrary to what M$ heads would have you believe, is about the same cost, maybe even less (because once it's running, it JUST WORKS.)

Several points here that need to be addressed.

1. Open Source does not necessarily mean "free". Especially in a situation like the original question poster's, I could definitely see wanting to buy software from a "respected" distributor like Redhat so that he will at least get some minimal amount of support. Okay, sure you can just grab everything you need and roll it all yourself, but that's actually more expensive in the long run. Which brings us to ...
2. You're deluding yourself and doing a great disservice by insinuating that open source software always "just works". That couldn't be farther from the truth. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, whatever open source operating system you happen to choose, still requires at least one administrator if it's used in a production scenario. You need someone to keep track of system events (ie, check the logs periodically for break-in attempts, make sure the hardware's not failing, make sure the software is all up and running and within good operating parameters, stay on top of security patches and upgrades, etc). These do not take care of themselves. As well, UNIX administrators are generally NOT cheap, compared to a standard MCSE. Yes, the UNIX admin will be much better than your normal MCSE, but the MCSE will be "good enough", and if a company needs somebody better, they can hire somebody better (and still possibly pay less than the price of a good UNIX admin ...).

The voters will automatically imply that your action of reducing costs will lead to lowered taxes and BAM!! you're elected.

Personally, I'd rather see my taxes reduced by getting rid of government pork barrel projects. Switching to Linux will save miniscule amounts of money compared with killing welfare so we no longer have to pay the crackwhore baby factories (yes, I know, the original discussion was a city government and I'm bringing federal government into it). Let's see some of these socialist safety nets go by the wayside. It's not how this government was meant to work, and it's sickening to see this country slide farther and farther into socialism. Before you know it, everything will be nationalized, minimum wage will be $15/hr, and we'll all be paying 75% taxes. Count me out.