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How To 'Sell' Open Source Software
An anonymous reader writes "Have we missed the boat in terms of selling Linux to the average Joe? The writer of this article at NewsForge certainly thinks so. He points out that most people don't yet get the idea of a free operating system, and that the best way to start winning them over is to provide free software for Windows, such as OpenOffice.org." This sentiment isn't new, but unlike a lot of commentators, the writer in this case is in a good place (as a retailer who's tried selling Linux-equipped systems) to observe the man-on-the-street reaction to Free operating systems as of 2003.
Why would I want to buy something that I can get for free?
In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.
... much business cheapbytes does?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
The average user buys a DELL or HP computer and, surprise, it comes with Windows included and they didn't get explicitly charged for it so it's free (in their mind). How do you really expect Joe Average to consider Linux if the current stuff is free and works fine for doing Excel stuff.
That's GNU/blowjobs you insensitive clod!
for anybody out there making a living writing free software.
how do you pay your bills? or do you all live in your parent's basement?
bite my glorious golden ass.
Microsoft has numerous on campus events where they give out copies of their software, in particular their Visual Studio development package.
In order to increase market share, these are the people who need to be sold on open-source. Currently there are not very many college students in CS or CompE that use open-source development products. In order to stay competitive, open-source must go out of its way to recruit these youngsters and give them the opportunity to try out open-source. This should happen at both the college and high school level.
This can be a real advantage to open-source as there are so many projects that these students can contribute on. It's a win-win situation. They get real-world hands on experience and open-source gets more coders and people dedicated to open-source philosophies.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
after hearing about mozilla for a while and how great it was. I decided to dl it, and it really is 100 times better than IE. Now I have a machine running a dual boot...and once I learn alittle more the windows 2000 partition will probably go away. Most people don't understand the concept of free software. Honestly most people don't care. they don't know enough and would rather be able to call up microsoft when something goes wrong, but if we show them a superior product, that is likely to get a response from them.
You cannot sell open source software, you sell the service of creating the software.
IF its the other sell however, I think people DO understand the concept of open source. You have all these people using Gnutella and Kazaa who understand the concept when its applied to music, so whats so hard to understand if we simply phase this into software?
I wonder why theres no P2P Linux Operating System
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Who the f' cares about selling Linux to the average Joe? I don't understand what the big deal is about EVERYONE on the planet having to use Linux. I use it and I think it's great, but why is the ultimate goal for everyone else to run Linux?
probably not to make one of its key selling points "the fact that it's free". People usually look at free or cheap things as unreliable. (This is exactly why most people don't buy GM/Ford/Hyundai/[insert your favorite Korean automobile manufacturer here] passenger cars. (Exception is to the GM/Ford trucks, those are good vehicles) It is almost universally known that those cars are unreliable.
What may work is the inclusion of OOo, samba, ximian connector, and gaim to point out to users that it "works exactly like and can interoperate with" windows files and servers. Also point out its widespread distribution in the server/enterprise arena. Some apple-esque switch ads may work too for the extra-dumb people out there.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Put it on some hardware then sell it. Period.
It's obvious why consumer electronics makers
are enthusiastic about Linux.
One way to get people using a new OS on home desktops is to introduce it in schools and offices. Apple makes a lot of sales to people who've learnt their OS on machines they'd sold to schools at a heavy discount. When they graduate and are looking for a home computer they remember Apple.
I'm not sure how this could be done with Linux (or in a corporate environment), but my best guess would be volunteer sysadmin support for schools and small businesses, combined with rehabilitation of unwanted / second hand i86 boxen. Anyone thinking of doing this should be aware that it's a long term commitment -- you have to provide ongoing support if you want it to work.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I don't think they think Windows is free, because a) they know Bill Gates is very rich, and b) because Windows upgrades in store are rather expensive.
This is my sig.
Well then, how about making an equivalent to VS.NET if you want folks to migrate from it? KDevelop is not going to cut it (integrated development environment).
Maybe make Linux something that most people have a purpose to run.
Clue #1: Gramma doesn't need to run a server in her knitting room.
Clue #2: Until you get games (I'm talking about *real* games, not Tux Racer) running reliably and well on Linux, you're cutting out a huge section there.
Clue #3: When Linux gets to the point of ease of use, bells and whistles, and an interface mimicking Windows so an idiot can use it intuitively without having to memorize command line strings, you'll get it.
You've created an operating system that's unfriendly, designed for elitist computer techno fantasies that the "lusers" can't understand, and you wonder why the damn OS isn't taking off.
Here's a clue. People like to use their computers, not be a slave to them. If it takes you all fucking day to set up your damn webcam, or get your video card to work, you have 3 games that support Linux, and gramma doesn't have time to read the Man pages because she just wants to check her damn email, there's something wrong with your operating system.
Parts of the market seem to be missing the point that software such as a consumer level OS and office software have little value these days. You really can't sell them by and of themselves. Photoshop has value, maybe Access does too, but Powerpoint, Excel, and Word are just expected - kinda like a webbrowser.
Most non-geeks think of Office as Windows, and of IE as The Internet, for example. You sell Joe Punter a Computer, not Hardware + OS + Applications. The sooner little stores like this "get it" the better. If they set a demo machine up with a slick looking Gnome2 interface (no RedHat doesn't count as slick :P), OpenOffice, Moz, and Gaim, then put it beside WinXP + Office for $300(?) more, then people would buy it. Maybe it takes a certain amount of customisation that isn't in the current distros, but 30 minutes on art.gnome.org should provide a nice looking UI - and to most folks, the UI is the Computer.
Selling it to people with the "It's Free and Therefore Good" argument is pointless. Sell it with "It Works and Costs Less" and you might get somewhere.
Also, try selling SOHO networks to leverage that into places Windows Server won't go - eg, Linux Server + 3 Linxu Workstations (diskless/netbooting is even better from a TCO and upgrade viewpoint).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Linux will really gain widespread acceptance when the PC comes from the store, preloaded by the technicians. It should be an option; "if you want to save $x off the sticker price, we can give you Linux". Until that choice is offered, Linux will be relegated to the hobbiests.
Dell is neat in the sense that they offer(ed?) the option of having your server preinstalled with RedHat. Wish they had the same option for desktops and laptops... I am currently installing RH9 on my Inspiron, and can see how hard it might be for the average person.
Comming from retail myself, i can assure you it's a real pain trying to explain to someone why every new fangled gadget they buy won't install with the CD thats provided.
Sure, Linux is a great OS, and there is a strong developer community for drivers, but unless you are using it in a single purpose machine, ala Lindows Webstation, where you KNOW the user isn't going to try installing anything, you as the reseller in trying to save the customer money are going to have to pay more each time he calls and asks " why won't my camera install?" or "why won't my Bluetooth adaptor work with my phone?"
Unless manufacturers start supporting Linux like the way they do windows, we arn't going anywhere.
Other then that, porting traditionally Linux tools to Windows is a good idea. You get peopel used to it first then transition them to linux. so then when the switch is made, they are still comfortable with the tools they have been always using.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Why dont you go to college campuses and give out Linux?
Anyway I dont thin linux is something you "sell" as a product though.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I agree with the sentiment. I think the largest obstacle to widespead use of linux by Mr and Mrs Average is they don't know anything different.
I used to work in a college as the sysadmin. The people that hung around me (yes some did!) eventually got around to trying linux. No-one else, including many CS students for which I ran tutorials (though anyone could come to these tutorials of course) didn't care, loved their 40G monolithic WinXP partition and so on.
Another obstacle is that Mr and Mrs Average aren't hackers. They may be able to get used to apt-get or rpm rather than clicking on an icon to install a program but they probably have hassles as to why supermount is often a bad idea (what is write-ahead caching anyway?).
People realise that they don't have to buy expensive office suites and other applications - that is what cd burners are for. What they don't realise is that they don't have to pirate them either.
I think that providing GPL software for the windows platform (as much as we may shudder) is a good first step. Mr and Mrs Average get to keep their current OS but get to explore and add functionality for free. They may or may not then make the jump to linux.
This guy is right on the money. A co-worker of mine recently had a conversation with someone on the topic of E-Mail clients. I recently introduced her to ThunderBird, and she loved it (She's an active Linux advocate). She showed it to who she was talking to. Of course, the topic of price came into play. "It's free", she said. You know what? I don't think I've ever seen a more confused look on a 50 year-old man's face. "What's the gimmick?" He asked. She proceeded to explain to him about OSS, and he just got more confused.
If we want Open Source Software to make an impact on Joe user, we need to ease them into it. Humans don't like change. We need to feed it to them with a baby spoon a little bit at a time, and if they have questions, try to explain it to them in the simplest of terms. "Thousands of programmers around the world work in their free time to provide everyone with superior software" will lead to "Why would they do that?" because when Joe user thinks of a programmer, he thinks of a glasses wearing computer nerd in a cubicle, getting paid to write programs. He doesn't understand the fact that programmers might program for fun.
I think we need to start some kind of a campaign. The masses must join together to provide something to Joe user that won't scare him. Don't try to explain everything to them, just give them a CD and say "Here, install this, it's better than Microsoft Office", or "Here, check this new E-Mail program out, it's got a really good thing for Junk Mail". If they ask "How much does it cost?", say "It's my copy, you can have it."
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yeah, I agree that this will help build mindshare. Once my wife began using Mozilla and OpenOffice on her Win98SE box, she was a bit more comfortable on my SuSE Linux 8.1 laptop. So there is something to this.
However, there is also something to having a killer app for your platform. Apple has desktop publishing locked up, and video editing a bit too (at least at the consumer level). Sure, anything the Mac can do, other systems can reproduce. Likewise, anything Linux can do, others could copy. But taking the lead in an area means people default to your system. You can see Linux doing this for high-end 3D animation, and high-end video work seems to be coming along for Linux too. And of course, the Linux server-based apps seem to really trounce Windows in a few areas. That's our "lock" and we need to do it more. Mozilla is the next thing I see -- more features than the competition, more standards, more stability, more up-to-date.
Finally, as a developer who has released a few Perl, PHP, and AppleScript apps, I find that the best way to win someone over is ease of installation. Wizards, wizards, wizards. Once past that, it's all user interface from what I can see. Is your app more intuitive? Does it expose more options in a sensible way? I have found that most things that are difficult on Linux are justified by users/developers with comments such as "this IS hard, this isn't for idiots, this is how it has to be." And then a month or a year later, another app comes out that does exactly the same thing with no feature loss or configurability loss, and it does it better. And it "outsells" the old product well. I am experiencing this right now with one of my products -- a free photo album tool called PHPortfolio. PHPix is more powerful, easier to install, and simpler to use. My app is getting trounced. But it should -- it's crufty. Happily, everything is free, so no loss other than ego. :)
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I spend a lot of time convincing customers that free is really ok.. That they DO have a choice.. many think they have to use Windows.. 'its what came on my pc'...
And then explain WHY its free.. Its a hard concept to grasp for the general public. "Why are they doing that for nothing... if its so good they could make money"
The laptop I carry with FBSD helps, as does the knoppix CD I leave behind... ( used to drop off 'demolinux' CDs, but knoppix is much more advanced as a useable *safe* demo at this point )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I personally probably won't be buying any open source products off the shelves anytime soon.
I bought a copy of SuSE linux a while back at a store. Paid about $40 or $60, got a few CDs and a couple manuals. I figured it was worth paying for the manuals and not having to download a gig and a half of ISOs... but unfortunately I was wrong.
I got it out of the box, and spent a couple hours installing it on my machine. So far so good, the installer was pretty easy to use and it went pretty fast (took maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I think.)
I booted up and was presented with a somewhat confusing login screen, and here for me is where it all went wrong - right there I had the option to choose multiple 'desktop environments' - it offered me KDE, GNOME, and a couple other options (I believe one of them was X11)... for me, this was confusing. I knew what all the environments were but I didn't particularly care to have to choose one just to use the machine. I started up KDE, since I had heard it was good. KDE started up fast, and I was able to hop in and start doing stuff. Did a little web browsing, and it worked great.
I logged onto IRC using XChat, and eventually one of my friends helped me get my windows drives mounted... unfortunately, it really wasn't pleasant having to figure out how to mount drives. I either didn't see SuSE's gui stuff for doing it, or that was a major oversight. So, SuSE lost a point there.
Then I started listening to some of my music in XMMS. Good so far, it worked great. I minimized it and started trying out the various apps that came loaded with the distro - games, productivity apps, etc. This is, IMO, where this distro (and the others I've played with, to a lesser or greater extent) failed. I was presented with multiple types of programs for almost everything, and there was very little on-screen help or guiding to help me select the best software to use. And to make things worse, some of the applications did things that I didn't expect. Selecting Wine caused my KDE desktop to dissapear and be replaced by Nautilus (the GNOME desktop, or so I'm told), and I couldn't get rid of it, so my session was now almost completely useless. I couldn't figure out how to do anything with nautilus or close it, so I had to shut down.
Then I tried to play one of the games I'd played on windows - Tux Racer. It said I needed hardware acceleration support, and here lies trouble. I fiddled with SuSE's configuration program (YAST) and could not get it to give me hardware acceleration for my Radeon 8500. It claimed to support it but wouldn't enable hardware 3d. So I went to ATI's site and grabbed their drivers. I then proceeded to try and install them. The installer messed with my configuration files, and then told me that I needed the kernel source code so I could recompile my kernel. (!) I didn't have the sources and I didn't know where to get them, so I closed the installer. Then, I opened YAST again to see if I could somehow find a way to get hardware acceleration working... and it wouldn't work. To make a long story short, somehow the combination of ATI's installer and YAST totally corrupted my XFree86 configuration to the point where even the CONSOLE would not display properly onscreen. Goodbye, linux partition.
If the companies behind these distros want to sell Linux to people and have them be satisfied customers (I have no problem supporting developers, but I wasn't happy with what I got for my money.), I think they need to work more on focus.
The average user doesn't need 3 CDs of stuff that he or she will probably never use. Include one good office suite, and make it easy to download the other ones if you ever need them - that's not hard to do! Do the same with other software... I don't think the average user needs to be confronted with multiple desktop environments, editing configuration files, and discerning the meaning of confusing application names. I know some distros are really good at being accessible, but there were only two distros at the store I visit
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Here's the man-on-the-street reaction:
/etc/XF86Config file!?"
"What, this doesn't work with my soundcard/videocard?"
"How do i change the freaken resolution in KDE!?
What, i have to edit a
"How do i use my cdrom/floppy drive, i have to mount it?, huhh?"
And lastly:
"I tried installing deer hunter, i put in the disk, and dag-nabbit, the thing just sat there. No install program or nothin."
Maybe this is relevant, maybe it's not, but I've got to get something off my chest.
I'm getting very tired of listening to open source cheerleaders (particularly Slashdotters) talk about how much they hate Sun in one breath, and then including OpenOffice among the free software that's going to supersede Sun in the next.
Without Sun, the OpenOffice project would undoubtedly continue, but it wouldn't continue nearly as fast. Sun is confused, but I think they'll eventually come around and realize that mainstream computing will eventually come down to just Windows and Linux. (Perhaps they'll lose their schizophrenia about Linux when they fire Scott McNealy, who knows.) But we need to remember that free software doesn't just materialize out of nowhere; it has to be created and maintained by actual people. Some of the best software out there is created by hobbyists, but with something as complex as a complete office suite, it does help to have a big staff of full-time developers working on it.
I challenge you all to stop mentioning Sun in the same breath as Microsoft, and instead try to figure out better ways to achieve Sun/Linux synergy.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
He very happy with my software, Mozilla, and the server. He is also happy with the overall performance and the fact that the server has not crashed. Of course I also gave him an estimate of how much everything would cost without open source. Needless to say he likes open source now. Not only does he like it, but his employees see the benefit and they learn that free doesn't mean worthless.
Even getting a small business to use open source helps a lot to promote it because every employee that uses it gets comfortable with it and has some exposure to generate marketing buzz.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
I think a nice selling point of free software is that you've got a bunch of geeky people, thousands, who are always working on making the overall OS experience better for the end user rather than a handfull of company developers who can't wait to get home and away from their project.
In the last couple of months I've come across tw ocustomers of the company I work for that are using open source software..
One, a small local bank that has 90% of what they have with some linux and Gnome. All desktop users (normally people who only need a word processor and a spreadsheet) use OpenOffice. Licencing costs = 0. This is not so easy to understand even for a business man. The guy in the IT deparment had to work his case.
The other one is swithing from MS Office to OpenOffice for every one excpet people who are really familiar (and actually use) with Excel. Every one else get's OpenOffice (on win32). This guys are saving some 10000 USD in licences. Still they had to be introduced to the subject of Free Software by one of the guys who works with me when our customer complained about the cost of Microsofts Office. This kind of "OSS consulting" for our customer, was some value added to another project we're on.
Still, I think, as people who benefit from the works of others for free, that we should encourage business users to make donations to projects they benefit from. At least to support these projects future survival.
"Yes."
More seriously... not even my boyfriend will touch Linux, because he can't play his Windoze-only (and/or Win-and-MacOS-only) games on it. He's not willing to touch an emulator. He doesn't want to use a piece of software that makes finding user-friendly software difficult. (Sorry, to you and I, 'bash' or 'grep' is user-friendly. Not so to him.) He doesn't want to use a piece of software that is so incredibly inconsistent that there is NO ONE WAY TO SET UP A NETWORK INTERFACE. (If you're using a shell, do it this way; if you're using Red Hat 8.x or higher, do it that way; if you're running Mandrake, do it this way; if you're running Debian, hack it your damned self cuz you're "supposed" to know how, etc. etc. etc.). And so on and so on. I love Linux as much as the next geek, but we REALLY have missed the boat. Mac OS X has already done more for open-source software in the real world of Joe Sixpack than Linux (and even *BSD) will ever do, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's how I feel on the issue.
Joe Sixpack couldn't give a good god damn about ideology. To him, ideology is something you learn in Church or in Ethics classes, and has nothing at all to do with software (or computers in general). To him, the notion that software can be "free as in speech" sounds like a ridiculous, out-of-context anthropomorphization, like saying "My car likes it when I pet the dashboard. See? It's purring!".
And as for "free as in beer", which most OSS/FS also is? To Joe, Windows, Office, etc. are all free as a flock of birds, since you either (A) get them free with new computer, (B) can download them off of KaZaa, or (C) mooch a copy from a friend or family member.
The ONLY way that OSS/FS will ever make headways into Joe Sixpack's life is if (A) it plays all of their games (or as many equivalently good AND POPULAR games), (B) it supports ANY piece of hardware you can buy, including WinModems, WinPrinters, WinWebcams, WinDildos and WinKitchenSinks, (C) things are consistent (which probably won't happen so long as there is more than one distribution) and (D) it STILL manages to be more stable and secure than Windows.
Oh, and it has to look and act just like Windows, too, or he'll say it's "too hard". I'm serious. I've had people tell me that Mac OS (or Mac OS X) is "hard", simply because they grew up in a Windows household, and familiarity breeds a false sense of intuition.
Not to be depressive, but... well, this is your wake-up call...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
how do you pay your bills?
We sell our virile bodies on the streets. Obviously.
The coolest voice ever.
Many people are afraid to switch to Free Software because there is that "No warranty as this is free" thing, and that point is used quite often.# c153
You can complain to user support at commercial company and they MUST respect your complains or you can get them in deep trouble. Within Free Software community you may only expect replies like this: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94035
(sorry, links to bugzilla from slashdot are disabled)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'm doing my Masters in IT at the moment, and so far we've developed in Java, Haskell, and C/GCC/prc-tools, using Eclipse as the recomended IDE.
No MS stuff so far.. I'm not sure if thats similar in Undergrad, but I suspect it might be.
This is at Macquarie University in Australia, in case you're wondering. They might be alone in this.
Average joe will use what their PC comes with preinstalled. They aren't going to know how to or want to change their OS. Unless of course a more knowlegeable friend or relative does it for them.
I come home to the x86 box and I want to use some lynx and some windowMaker, because I learned once again how lame WinXX is.
I bought OpenBSD 3.3 but I could not make my ppp connection work. It just wouldn't go. I did everything the documentation for OpenBSD and FreeBSD explained, for both the ppp and pppd ways of connecting, same problem persisted. My modem goes through the authentication stage and then things fail during the IP address negotiation. It says, "Writing route to socket: error: no process."
AAAGH!! Now I am so impressed when I plug the Win98 hard disk drive back in and things just work :P And, quite frankly, Debian installed with just boxes checked for things I need [i.e. dialup support] has a lot of things I don't want, like ISDN and ASDL support. I know that's what dselect is for, but if you go down the list and uncheck bunches the bloat proggies, well that takes forever. Faster to just install :P
If anyone happens to know how to fix my ppp hell, please respond.
What we need is an open-source distribution of software for Windows. It would install Mozilla, OpenOffice, GIMP, and whatever else seems useful. Wrap it up with a nice installer that makes the "open" nature of the software clear. Configure everything so that a mindless XP user can just run the installer and get all of the best that the opensource folks have to offer. It could become a very popular thing if it was all in one place and easy to find.
I can see a market for retail sales as well, so it could be worthwhile for a for-profit company to pursue this. I would love to be able to hand windows users a CD with an Open Source bundle of software and know that they will probably be able to explore and use the software without much handholding.
I have a quick observation that comes from demonstrating Linux to such disparate folks as a VMS database admin, an intelligent, 68-year-old man who remembers when he first saw an electric lightbulb, and an 18-year-old who grasps anything having to do with computers in seconds.
And the observation is this: Linux on the desktop does not give current users of Microsoft products anything that makes them want to leave the Microsoft world. Even the price argument fails, because people of even moderate means will tell you that the cost of a "loaded" PC isn't prohibitive. The 68-year-old said it was too much trouble to learn a new way of doing things, particularly if it meant not having Office and IE. The DB admin said it looked interesting, but she wasn't impressed with the availability of front ends for MySQL and Postgres. And the 18-year-old asked what games were available.
Friends, we should not be looking for mass adoption. Linux on the desktop is for inquiring minds, people who want change. Most users out there just want it to be easier or faster than it presently is - - scary, considering a blindfolded monkey could operate the Windows GUI. Can we fill a need for these people? Can we make it easier, and faster?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I work at Circuit City, and any time a customer asks me about Office (none of our computers come with it and everyone wants it), I always tell them about OpenOffice and give them the web address. But, almost none of my fellow salespeople knew about it before I got there. So, I think one thing that would definitely help is if some funding could be provided to have a free/oss rep go to Circuit Citys, Best Buys, etc and either give them discs, literature, or just educate them about what's available. They'll pass it on to their customers. God knows my coworkers have lost a bunch of sales because customers didn't feel like paying $400 for office for school when its bundled with some Dells (of course it ends up costing the same thing, but if these were smart and informed customers, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place). Plus the stores wouldn't care, cause the profit margins are nonexistent for software.
barzelay.net
Now you're asking for a dangerous precedent. VS.NET gives people who should never touch a compiler the impression that they know what they're doing. To avoid turning this into a pissing contest, there are already a coupe of good IDEs for Linux, like Anjuta, which is about right for intermediate coders, and for the "point-and-click" set there's even Kylix which is about as much of a RAD tool as anything you'd find on Windows.
My brother-in-law is the CFO of a Fortune 500 corp. He bought a Dell computer a couple of months ago, and wanted Word, Excel and PowerPoint on it so he could work from home on weekends. Through a mix-up, Dell didn't include or charge for MS Office Small Biz Edition, which would have raised the price $150. He was about to call Dell and ask them to send the software. I told him not to and downloaded OpenOffice for free. Saved him $150. The CFO was impressed. :-)
So why can't someone willing to provide support for OpenOffice contract with Dell, for example, and in those dropdown menus where you configure your computer you'd see MS Office for $150 and up, and OpenOffice (with MS Office compatibility noted) for $10 or $20. I think they'd sell a few copies.
And even then, they're very likely to whine, "This is hard!" until said friend or relative puts Windoze BrainNumber Pro 2005 (or whatever's the 'latest and greatest' edition of Windows) back on...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
That's actually what I'm trying to get a local shop to do. Sell small form-factor PC's that are targeted to a specialized purpose. Usually server related. Sell some service with that, and that'll carry a small shop through these tough times. Baby steps, baby steps, I don't think they're quite ready for the client-side of things, even though there are a few there who dabble with Linux. There's money there for those who don't leave any stone unturned.
"free" is a particular failure as a word - one can tell this by the fact that it's so frequently followed by the necessary clarification ("free as in speech" or "free as in beer"). One wouldn't describe the Magna Carta or the US Declaration of Independance as a "free document", so describing software that's "unencumbered" as "free" is stretching the meaning of the word rather far. Worse, the overloading of free, as in "without cost" simply serves to confuse matters for the layman further. Why is he being charged for "free software"? Isn't this "freeware"? "Libre" is better, but still not ideal. I don't really have a better phrase, but I bet if GNU software was called "libertyware" then every republican senator would be insisting the F22 ran it and that e-voting systems were fully libertyware. That's horrible and lowbrow and cheap, and that's often how marketing has to be.
"open source" is a bit better, although there's still _plenty_ of people who have no idea what "source" is. There's also the confusion with Open Standards and Open Systems. Again, I don't have a really good alternative. "community software"?
So, that's my suggestion for our cynical brandname - Community Libertyware. "Meaningless jargon", you might say. Yep, that's the idea.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
MS Office/SBE does not include PowerPoint. And a CFO from a Fortune 500 company will soon find out the many ways in which OO is NOT Microsoft Office.
Assuming, of course, that he uses Excel a lot. And Powerpoint.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Unfortunately, it's been my experience that too many programmers and users think Open Source really means "free as in beer". Too many of them don't even understand the difference between BSD and GPL licenses. And what I find amazing is that there is no one selling a service or writing books devoted to training employees and mangers about all the difference licenses and their obligations.
If it was just a question of Apache or BSD licenses, I think people would be as quick to adopt as they are to share music files, but the GPL is a lot more scary than even Microsoft's EULA. You pray to God no programmer in your shop has tweaked something GPL in order to make a project work. It's one of those cases where you would be a lot happier if they didn't have access to the source.
Now we know why this is, Slashdot programmers want to protect their intellectual property rights from Microsoft even more than the RIAA wants to protect it's copyrights from Slashdot programmers. And that's perfectly understandable. But it makes for slow adoption. When the very act of bugfixing a GPL project on your spare time, may make some other code of yours "derivitive" of that project, you have to ask yourself if being able to see the code is a good thing or not.
So Corporations treat Open Source very carefully, and as a result people treat it very carefully at home. After all, it's very hard to trust people for whom distrust seems to be a second nature.
No Zen is good zen
AFAIK, our entire CS department at Caltech is either on Linux or Solaris, and I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of students use PINE to check their mail. I don't think exposure on the college level is a problem. ;)
The problem with open source projects being ported to McWindows is that in the end, it's still at the mercy of the operating system.
The whole point of many of these projects is to have as little to do with MS (i.e.: none) as possible.
I've been thinking this for a month or so. We do need to put open source software onto windows.
Windows users install software all the time. They seem to love it. Next time they need to upgrade their Office suite they wouldn't think its crazy to install a free office suite. With installing software is familiar territory. Replacing windows however would seem crazy to them though. There are so many unknowns.
The average joe will hear about open office and will eventually upgrade and will see the $many hundred dollar sticker price and choose OpenOffice.org.
Sooner or later we'll see people become comfortable with free software. People will be using many different open source programs for their daily work, and then it will be more trivial to move to linux.
Ironically the more people can save in licenses the more it can cost to convert to open source. Remember, if a large company converts to something like OpenOffice they need to retrain every user. That gets very expensive. When a small company gets converted (about 25 employees or less) training can usually be done very easily.
Also, in a large company, you will have users complaining, "Why did we change, I can't do ZZZ anymore." Of course that would cause negative sentiment about open source.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
If Sun could lose Gosling and McNealy, they'd be fine. Gosling (known nowadays as the "inventor of Java") was the guy who originally pissed off RMS, when Gates was still in school - Gosling produced the first non-free emacs clone! The main reason Java isn't DFSG-Free open source is because Gosling won't let it be. Most sun engineers who actually do work instead of sitting round being the "inventor of java" want java to go truly Open Source.
McNealy, well, he's got an incredible knack for screwing up really good ideas at the last minute. Don't know why.
But try and think back to when you were first being introduced to the whole concept. If you're anything like me, it was months before you actually began to look at anything seriously.
It actually depends upon how old you are and when you started using computers. I'm old enough that Microsoft wasn't supplying operating systems when I started using computers.
The first real OS I used (not counting CP/M) was 4.3BSD at the university. After four years of that, MSDOS seemed like a toy. I never considered it anything more than a program loader.
So when I first heard about Linux (0.97) and FreeBSD (1.0), I knew they weren't toys. I took them seriously. So I kept an eye on them until I was able to afford a computer that they could run on. When I finally got a computer with a drive large enough for dual booting I took the plunge with Slackware. Eventually I tried FreeBSD and was home at last with a direct descendent of the OS I started with.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yeah, thousands of geeky people who each build their own app using their own version of whatever, which, in order to use, requires half a dozen other things. Sure, they're all free, but to download, compile, install, all these pre-requisites for whatever, is a major pain in the ass, even for a geeky person. Just the other day I decided I wanted the latest version of the gimp. So, I downloaded it and started config. Oopsy-Daisy! Need gtk-perl. Ooopsy-Daisy! Need atk, glib, and something called pango. Go figure. So, after downloading, untar/zipping, configure, make, make install all of these... Ooopsy-Daisy! The gtk Makefile has something wrong with it so it doesn't find the *.o files. Solved by copying from install root to subdirs. Whew! Now, after all this crap, I was able to get gimp made and installed. Yay! It was free! And sure, it's a good program, but could my mom do this? My grandma? Joe End User? Should they be required to? There's just too much fragmentation, too many dependencies on 3rd party libraries. Building and installing anything is such a pain in the ass that it's usually not worth it. KDE is getting better, but I've resisted installing the latest version because I don't want to go through that song and dance again; You need this. Download here... oh, for this, you need this, download here. Oh, for that, you need this, download here. The nice thing about MS OS/apps is that you have your installation, and when you install software, the installer installs whatever it needs. You don't have to visit half a dozen ftp sites to build the prerequisites for whatever you want. As much as I like Linux, until there are fundamental changes in the way this works, it's really not going to be something that REAL people want to use.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
In house development makes the company rely on the people that developed the custom solution. Problem with that is most IT people don't stay in the same job for more than 2 years or so (until reaching a certain status). With a outside purchased product, there is a safety blanket; someone to call.
Uhwhah? No, Joe Sixpack is a few steps beyond my BF in terms of computer illiteracy, thanks. I wouldn't be hoping to marry a Joe Sixpack type. I probably wouldn't even be speaking with them, except to ream them out for wasting my time with stupid tech-support-type questions. ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The answer if really simple.... NO ONE BESIDES PEOPLE WHO ARE INVOLVED IN IT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT LINUX!!!! Get upset all you want, flame all you want....but it is the truth. Be honest, what average user wants to deal with Linux when everything they get exactly what they want, they way they want it with Windows. "But it is more stable!!! Blue screen of death!!!" Windows XP and Windows 2000 are very stable. I am not even going to get into the rest of the objective dreck Linux zealots spew about the supposed superiority of using Linux over Windows: "It comes with a compiler!", "You can customize your on desktop, nevermind it takes a thousand years for X to do what you want it to do.." yes, yes, I know, I dont know what I am talking about....I am spreading FUD, I am a M$ shill, never mind the fact that I have been running Linux for damn near a year now..... Face it, Linux is not ready for the home market... besides that nobody cares because Windows does what it is supposed to,and much faster and better. So why switch to an OS they know nothing about cause some geek told them so?
If customers don't like "Free", don't tell them that it's free. Charge them for it. Tell them it's industrial strength software that's far more reliable than Microsoft.
Tell them that they can get regular updates through your company as part of the initial contract.
Maybe I've just grown tired of hearing people ask when linux will become mainstream. I no longer care if it does.
I used to sell customers systems with an OS that cost way too much for what they got(no not an MS product) We developed using tools that cost a hell of a lot and didn't offer much more functionality then syntax highlighting. The systems just up and crashed at times and noone could explain it.
The customers eventually got mad about the stability of the system. So we're replacing it. Linux, Mysql, php, apache and a whole lot of custom modules.
So far in testing the users are much happier, the developers are happier and the over all systems cost far less which we directly pocket as profit. The customers could care less that the system is built on free software, they just need it to work.
Does it really matter if grandma doesn't use linux at home? In the early days it didn't matter that noone used linux for anything. People still made it and now it's useful, that will never change.
thiscomputer costs X, thiscomputer2 costs Y, Y X for ANY instance thiscomputer.
Now, someone to put that in english and youre home free.
Arguments:
yeah, you can edit word documents although they will, in some very few cases, need tweaking when they come from word and you need to edit them. Viewing them is no problem though, this will open them all with no problem.
Also, sending stuff to other ppl will be no problem either, you just save it into a format called PDF and everyone in the world will be able to read them.
Yeah, this will connect to the internet. Configuring it is the same as in windows, just open the internet connection menuoption. Its all in this slick short mandrake/redhat/suse manual.
NOW, if your shop tried to do this with no manuals, no start-here guide with the five steps to link to the internet, editing documents and configuring the printer, then its all your fault. That was supposed to be your job.
What the hell. YEAH, this technology can take the power (and money) OFF micrisoft and into YOUR pockets. But for christ sakes, you have to work a little more to achieve an acceptable level of quality for your average user. What did you think!, it came all ready for THEM? NO it comes ready for YOU so that YOU make it easy for THEM.
NO SIG
If the sole reason that people don't buy OSS and Linux systems is because it is "free as in beer" for the software, then just CHARGE THEM FOR THE SOFTWARE.
Of course, that isn't the reason they aren't buying. The real reason is up for you to figure out.
...
...
What the scary guy in the parent post says is false, right ?
Right ?
Microsoft certainly tries hard to put the stuff out there, but my campus, for one, teaches most everything on Sun and Linux machines. The interesting thing is, MS got through to me somehow anyway. In fact, I would always write my code in Vsual Studio first if at all possible. I guess their product really is better. Certainly, exposure to something like KDevelop would have helped, if it was free to write any sort of code I want rather than just open source. Does it get them much cash from me? The last time I bought something from MS explicitly was a Windows XP beta CD for $20. I think if anything, the fact that I was able to get VS and XP for free makes me expect to do so in the future as well.
Can't speak about information, but I looked at a few sites that used these programs, including the demos. In all the ones I saw, phportfolio has sites that look far more professional. The phpix sites I saw looked, well, amaturish, clunky, *cheap*.
You say yours is crufty? It looks like 1.0 was released july 23, less than two weeks ago. If your still working on it, keep it up, clean up the crufty parts, make installation easier. Good job on the tool, it produces really nice and clean pages.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
root@id1: su Microsoft
You could actually take that one literally or phonetically, the outcome would be the same...
Another hillarious post.
Many Thanks,
Luke
As a tech working on DOS and WfW3.11 machines on a Netware network in the Navy, I knew nothing of OSS in the early 90's. For intranet email, we were running a 100 user license for Lotus cc:Mail that didn't even have an internet mail connector, which they quoted us several thousand dollars for. A wiser-man-than-me told me to look into Pegasus and Mercury by David Harris. I downloaded it for free, downloaded the free manuals, read them, installed it, and it worked perfectly! What a shock! It was better than cc:Mail in every way, and it was free! David Harris joined ADM Grace Hopper on my hero list. Pegasus may not fit the OSS definition exactly, but it introduced me to the concept in a project that saved my command thousands of dollars while working better and having more usefull features than the commercial competitor. I think it interesting that this was learned in a very commercial DOS/Win/Netware shop with no Linux in sight.
This post was randomly generated by man on too much coffee and too little sleep beating on a keyboard.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/en/index.html
:)
download (link at bottom of page) and burn
say it is a promotional effort
...is extremely difficult. A lot of people have some absurd sense of brand loyalty... especially Joe Average. If they've never heard of it before, why would they want to try it. I've gone around setting the default browser to Mozilla, but as soon as it opens, it gets shut down and the user opens IE. Getting people to use something that is "free as in speech" is like getting people to actually excercise their free speech... or worse yet... getting them to go out and vote. I'm afraid that's how absurd our society is. But it's true, if you bundle open source applications on a McWindows system, and people have no other choice, they'll learn to use GIMP, OOo, Moz, etc. So this is a nice attempt at exposing people. Honestly, people freak out when i give presentations in Linux using StarOffice ... only because they have no idea what that means.
If people have trouble with open source software being free, why not put it on a peer-to-peer filesharing network and pretend that it's really cool pirated software (pirated by folks with such 1337 skillz that they have never been busted by the BSA).
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
1. Post Slashdot Article 2. ??? 3. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 get ported to linux 4. ??? 5. Big user base! 6. ??? 7. Profit!!!
Repeal the DMCA!
Tell the world that Linux can only be used if you pay big money for it, let it magically show up on a few P2P networks, and pretty soon it will be everywhere.
Just because the free software is available for Windows doesn't mean people will attempt to use said software. For example, my church is looking to start a new congregation, and was purchasing software to run the church with (Quark, Powerpoint, etc.). I recommended using OpenOffice. Even though there was a free Windows version available for download, they purchased the several thousand dollar liscenses to use the "professional" software suites. The reasoning behind the purchase was that (direct quote) "free software can't be all that good, or it wouldn't be free." In another long conversation I held with a friend, he couldn't understand how something like Linux could be made for free. He kept wanting to assign some kind of ulterior motive to a "free software". After explaining how CVS and bug forums work, he wanted to know if maybe people were using the guise of "free software" to place viruses on people's computers. This friend is a philosopher, in the honors class at the college I attend, and is by no means stupid. But he just couldn't understand how free software works, even though I'd gotten him hooked on Phoenix a few months earlier. I think too many people see free software as something like RealPlayer, where the company makes money off of selling the Real authoring tools, selling Pro versions of their software, and (in addition) putting ads in their software for more services. People just don't understand how something can be offered totally free.
Why should Joe User care about OSS? All he wants is to sit down and check his email, surf the web, and play games. It doesnt matter to him if it is running windows, linux, apple, or anything else just that it works. And right now OSS isn't for everyone and problably will never be for everyone.
Hey, if you're happy with MS having a virtual monopoly on the desktop and running around like a 500lb psychotic gorilla, then by all means, sit in your little corner, run Linux, and ignore the mainstream desktop, but DON'T ever complain to anyone about MS's behavior or market influence.
Not sure what LOE it would take to gather up the most common settings that would have the be carried over, as well as put together something that can scan your hard drive and categorize each program/file type as
- Can run under an open-source equivalent
- Backup/Printout first, nothing is known that can open these files ever again
Great for schools that get older hardware too. I'd love for something like that that I could pop into a few old boxes I have lying around!The basic problem with competition on a monopolist O/S is that if you compete with the monopolist then your programs will not work well, particularly these days of almost daily O/S updates...
I think it is not a solution to get people to use Open Source on Windows.
Maybe Open Source Software on Cygwin (or similar) under Windows? Then all applications will break at the same time when an O/S update is released, which makes it quite obvious...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
You have two choices:
(1) Charge money for the version that the software is optimized for. If it's optimized for Windows, but a very stable beta for Linux or BSD, then charge money for the OS it's most likely to be used on. Likewise goes for Linux of BSD ports. If anyone complains, explain that logically the product it's optimized for is undergoing continuous change, therefore the money paid is needed to compensate the hours spent making sure that it will run universally under the given platform. Considering Windows undergoes continuous patches and service packs, this is a valid argument (considering how often said patches or service packs can break most apps made for it.
(2) Charge money for it, based on the platform the software is most commonly used, on a sliding scale. If one runs it under Windows, charge a $15 fee. If it's BSD or OS X, charge $10. If it's under Linux, charge anywhere from free, to $5. If people cannot adapt, then they should pay a penalty, frankly.
To use the ol' tired automotive analogy, people who use an automatic transmission pay at least twice over for that convenience, one being the cost of replacement transmissions twice that of manuals, and the second being the loss of fuel efficiency. This rule applies in every consumer market, and should apply under software as well (since we *are* talking about attempting to make a consumer market out of open source software).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I've been a journalist and consultant specializing in Linux for several years, and I've seen this syndrome many times among clients, friends, and relatives. People get all excited about "stickin' it to MS" and getting a more robust desktop, but when they find out they can't run their greeting card program or their kid's favorite games or Quicken or AOL or any randomly chosen hardware goodie from Staples or Circuit City (which comes with Windows support, of course), they lose interest in Linux faster than you can say BSOD.
Yes, Linux has made astonishing progress in just a couple of years in terms of usability and ease of installation and configuration. But that's not nearly enough. Until it can do what would-be customers want, it's completely useless to them.
At this point, I'll take what I can get.
For instance, I was initiated into Linux, Emacs etc because a certain programming course required it;the lecturer developed a grade-tracking software, and didn't want to port that to Windows, so all our labs were done in Linux. We learnt all those Emacs keyboard tricks from seniors in the span of a week (before we discovered what the Vi versus Emacs flame was all about).
So yes, at least in the bigger, older universities, Linux/Unix is already an established thing with full community participation.
More than mere navel gazing.
If the problem is that free == worthless then the writer should find the price point that consumers will be willing to risk giving it a try - say, 30-40% of the average WinOS-only price.
Then a salesperson can say to the customer, "Not only do you get this nifty OS, but you also get a whole bunch of apps - and for under half the price you would pay for just the WinOS."
Without Sun, maybe we wouldn't have Open Office at all ! Probably out of desparation they would have added tables into abiword. That would be like upgrading my computer to 4 GHz but at no hardware cost ! Cool !
Trying to get the "Average Joe" to run free software isnt going to be done by having him dive into an emulator in order to run a program. "Average Joe" would probably rather download the whole emulator bundled into the same executable than run [even in the background] two programs to do one.
Trust me, Average Joe doesnt care. Though he will care that no matter what you do, Emulation is going to slow shit down.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This is my project, which seems to fulfill the goal: Open Source Software CD, updated only two days ago with the latest software versions.
One overlooked reason why more people aren't adopting Linux is that they can't get Linux applications at the same place they buy their software -- from stores.
Take a look around a CompUSA, a Walmart, a Best Buy, an Office Depot, or Amazon, or any other franchise that sells software. You might see a few boxes of RedHat or Mandrake, but if you start looking for specific kinds of applications that run on Linux, you won't find any. (Yerah, I know Linux distros are chocked full of apps, but most people don't know that; even if they do, they'll get a confusing array of applications with overlapping functionality.)
It's all well and good to have bunches of free Linux applications available for people who know how to find them and install them. And, how to get rid of them if and when they turn out to be unsatisfactory.
That's not the case for most people. They already own Windows (or a Mac). They only need new software very occasionally, and then they can afford to pay for it. If that's the case, why dump Windows and spend hours getting up to speed on Linux just to get one free app? That's a high-risk approach.his is probably the reason for all the Mars probes launched over the last few months."
his is probably the reason for all the Mars probes launched over the last few months."
The heritage of Linux and Gnu is a double-edged sword. It enables a flowering of talent among the developer community, but it also isolates Linux from the mainstream.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
At this point, I'll take what I can get.
Anything with a pulse && || circulatory system?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
The first step to explain free software is to make sure that people start thinking about free from an ideological standpoint and not a financial standpoint. Free software may cost less to implement in some cases, in others it costs more. One way or another, the jury is still out on the money issue.
Instead, push the concept of freedom. Make it clear that a company spending millions of dollars a year on software and only getting what the vendor wants to sell could instead hire a bunch of open-source coders to add corporate interests to existing projects. Point out that OpenOffice formats are totally open, and help the company escape Microsoft's proprietary file format hell. Teach corporations that for far less than the cost of buying software, they can hire programmers to represent their interests in thousands of useful open-source projects.
People don't want to see free software as a way to get out of paying. That just makes them see the whole free/open source community as the eurocentric, socialist monstrosity that proprietary software vendors insinuate about. Offering people more actual freedom in the way they conduct their business, if not their lives, will open doors that saving dollars never can.
The interesting thing here is that quite a few are using Pirated versions of windows (No I can't name names ;-) and other software. Pretty much because of reason #2. They ask around, find out what other people are using and get that. They would rather run illegal software than use free software that works differently to the rest of the world.
I'm not sure that the whole idea of running windows software is a good one. it was tried with OS/2. Everyone who ran windows software on it agreed that generally speaking it ran better, The problem was that customer apathy said that it wasn't enough better. So they kept using windows.
In my experience if you want people to move to a different OS (be it Linux, OS/2, whatever) you must give then more than "it's better" as a reason. You must "show" them that they will be massively better off by the move.
One of the most powerful motivators to get people to change is to get them thinking that their neighbour is better off than they are. Greener lawn because of "Miricle Grow", faster car by buying Caltex instead of Exxon, better computer because of Linux instead of Windows. If a person thinks that they are being deprived, then they will generally do something about it. It does not matter whether the product is actually better or not.
In this case selling OS by running windows doesn't really do anything for the user. Sure we can use the crash protection and smoother running arguments, but in general the difference is not enough to make the sale. Instead I think we need to sell it based on how much better the linux apps are than their windows counter parts. Sure Linux is a (said quietly) little harder to setup. But the benefits of the software you can run are the sellers.
I used this technique when talking to people about OS/2 years ago and am still convinced that if IBM had the ability to sell it, it would not be dead.
So don't tell a user about running his window apps. Tell him/her about downloading files/compiling a new custom kernel/playing an mp3 and running seti all at the same time. Ask them to try the equivalent on a windows machine.
My personal favourite at the moment is that seti runs over 200% faster under Linux on the same hardware. 8 hours a unit down to 3.5 hours. That turns heads.
Regards,
Derek.
It was clever and funny at first, but now it's getting old.
That's one of the things I do. The other fear that people have is that they will break something (wonder were they got that fear from ? :). That's one of the reason I give Knoppix disks away. Try this, the first hits free. He,he, seriously this is not only a good way to reduce the fear factor. It's also a good way when you want to demo Linux to an audiance. What I would like to see is more specialized distros based around the Knoppix concept. Want a strong, but easy firewall? Want a proxy, and mail server? Want a portable java development environment? Etc, etc, and the fear factor is reduced, while the benifits go up.
BTW The "It doesn't work anymore." or "This and that aren't as smooth" issues are greatly reduced because you've already set everything up, and verified it works, and it can't be changed thereby breaking something problem is gone.
Disclaimer: I use BBEdit and emacs (learned it before I knew about vi, so I have no idea which one's better) to program at school, as I have a Mac.
I would say that what the OSS programming community needs is a better IDE. (This is distinct from what the OSS community as a whole needs, which I would say is a better desktop environment, to attract computer newbs.) While emacs / vim are pretty good programs, they are nothing to Visual Studio. VS's method-name completion, function argument tooltips, etc make it much easier to program in than either emacs or BBEdit. MS also has better debuggers and better compilers than the open-source community.
Although I use Linux all the time (right now, in fact), I must admit that their interface is mediocre compared to OSX (especially for nongeeks; I do wish OSX had virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse), their IDEs are mediocre compared to Microsoft's, their browsers are mediocre compared to Safari, etc.
If the Open Source community is to spread, we must be better than the competition, or at least comparable. And right now, we are barely comparable, and that expensive proprietary software is worth it in many cases.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The parent poster is one of the following:
a) A very good troll (remember, you shouldn't feed the trolls)
b) A very stupid idiot (one who can't be reasoned with)
I can't be sure which. Either way, just ignore his shenanigans and don't encourage him to waste more of our time.
Here's a corrected version:
1. Sell free software (+ $1,000,000,000)
2. Send the invoice (- $0.35)
3. Get the check (check for $1,000,000,000)
4. Go to the bank (- $gas)
5. Pay my bills
6. Check bounces
7. ???
8. Profit!
GNU/Linux is going to be competing with MS in a top-down fashion, not a bottom-up grass-roots fashion. The major uses of GNU/Linux will be in the most complicated of things, big, large-scale research, complicated physics, and so-on and so-forth. There will also be huge data-base uses of it. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Walmart are either running completely on it or switching everything over to it, at great $$$ savings to themselves. Slowly, more and more corporate work-stations will be one or another brand of GNU/Linux as well.
Now, being quite honest, the brand is probably going to be RedHat, Lindows, or Mandrake. One of the no-brainers. And, as a Gentoo user, I don't see any reason why this should be bothersome to those of us who like the more do-it-yourself distros, like LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian. All GNU/Linux distributions basically use the same software anyways, can all use the same drivers, and so-on and so-forth. The differences are in what packages are offered, and the packaging system.
After GNU/Linux starts making significant inroads on corporate and public workstations, it will then start to impress itself upon private desktop users.
One thing that does need to be worked on is standardization accross applications. PicoGUI provides an answer for this by completely divorcing form from content. Programmers should not be deciding how programs look and respond to user-input...they should be deciding what programs actually do in response to a certain input. E.g., they should specify "menu, with these items on it, each of which does xyz" or "toolbar, with these buttons, each of which does abc"...then, depending on the environment the user's in, the menu or toolbar is drawn to fit in and behave consistently with all other apps.
This does not mean that those trying to make GNU/Linux better for the home-user should quit. Many of the supporters are home-users. But, we should understand that GNU/Linux is going to "trickle down" from top to bottom.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
OK, if you want people to try open source software, consider your markets and find ways to go after them. Here are two examples.
The first market is made up of kids and would-be developers. Yes, I know those may be two groups, but they're tied together in that you want to get them acquainted with Linux and/or other open source projects. In fact, getting them interested is critical, since they're your next generation of developers and consumers. For them, you try to get them introduced in schools, whether it is elementary school, high school, or college. How many of us got introduced to computers at school on a TRS-80 or a TI-994A? These machines are primitive now, but they were a good first step. Find ways to get Linux-equipped machines into schools. It would probably also be helpful to create a special distribution just for this purpose. Remember, you're fighting for mindshare with Microsoft, and right now, Microsoft is winning. Why should Windows be the first OS that someone sees? Why should they be introduced to Linux as the "alternative" OS?
The next group to focus on is everyone else. Again, this is not just one group, but look at it as "established" computer users. If you want them to try Linux or other open source software, or at least get a sense of awareness that it's out there, then you must think big. Yes, the plan I'm going to outline may sound outlandish, but think of it as a huge PR stunt. Here we go...
1. Bring together a group of software development teams who want to participate in this. By this, I mean the groups responsible for various projects, such as Mozilla, OpenOffice, Cinelerra, Red Hat, etc.
2. Once you know who's "in", construct a consumer-friendly Web portal featuring the software of the participating developers. Make the site attractive, easy to navigaye, informative, and for God's sake, make it understandable for the average computer user. Yes, you'll have to dumb it down a little, but before anyone starts screaming about that, remember that this site will in no way take the place of what's out there; it'll just supplement it. Its mission will be to introduce people to open source software in a way that will engage them.
3. On this site, along with a place to download software, you're going to allow people to order free CDs of the featured software. How this gets packaged is up for discussion, but you must offer them CDs, since not everyone will have the connection or patience to download all this stuff. Remember, AOL doesn't mail out all those discs just for fun. They've realized that when you put one in a person's hands, curiosity will often get the better of them, and they'll run it.
4. Now that the site is ready, it's ready to be promoted. To do this, you can do all sorts of things. You can dress people up as penguins and have them walk through New York, you can buy ads on city buses, or you can think really big. How about collecting money to buy a commercial on the Super Bowl? Yeah, I know that sounds ridiculous, but don't underestimate how many viewers such an ad will get. Remember the ad for the Macintosh? And for added effect, produce the commercial using only open source software, and make sure everyone knows it. That fact alone will get people's attention, most likely the network execs and producers, not to mention many independent production companies.
What I'm getting at with all this is that if you want to promote Linux and open source software, no matter what group you're targeting, you absolutely must get out there and get your message and product in front of them. In advertising, there's an acronym that describes this: AIDA. It goes like this:
A=Attention. Get their attention.
I=Interest. Make your message interesting to your audience.
D=Desire. Make them want your product.
A=Action. Leave them with a call to action, and make sure they know what they can do to get your product.
Microsoft is making sure consumers know who they are and what they offer. If Linux and OSS is to compete, it had better do the same.
"...our entire CS department at Caltech..."
However, the typical CS department at a more typical university that a more typical student (not a "super-genius" Caltech student) would study at is almost entirely Windows-only.
The 2~20 box SOHO market faces a major barrier to Linux adoption- no support by the companies that make the specialized software for their businesses. I once took a poll- The mortgage company's software: No Linux support. Three different medical office billing/EMR packages: Nope. The fire station's software: Nope. The SOHO market depends on these specialized packages, that for the most part, have no OSS counterparts, or Linux support. Until that need is filled, Linux isn't a viable option for them.
Without, Sun OpenOffice would never have existed. It would have just ended up as a dead product when StarDivision gave up the ghost. Sun purchased it for their own use, and then they went a step further and opened up the code. In the end it works out for everyone, open source developers have a head start on an office suite, Sun receives free labor.
Of course this is not significant in the big picture, but its interesting to see open source software here and there that is attractive to a power user that doesn't give a flying leap about open source, programming, or anything besides being a power user. It pleases an old geezer like myself.
i don't mean to issue flame bait but isn't the reason why people started charging for stuff like software because they knew that if they didn't they'd be doing work for free ? I think that the only way you can make money with open source software is through value added support, so now you have something they need. People aren't going to pay you for something they can get free unless it's value added, it doesn't have to be much i.e. spring water's only value added point is that it is supposedly more pure eventhough regular water is free.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Currently there are not very many college students in CS or CompE that use open-source development products.
I don't know what college students you know, but I graduated from college this spring, and used almost entirely open-source products. They used to use MS VisualC++ in some classes, but it was such a frustrating experience for all involved that they dropped that a year or two before I got to those classes and went to an entirely Linux development environment. We got a pretty good dose of system level programming in Linux, as well. One guy even wrote his senior thesis on open-source development models and the philosophy behind open-source.
Maybe my school was the exception rather than the rule though. None of my professors had a particularly high opinion of M$.
Ryn
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
What really pisses me off are the laptop dealers who offer to put Linux on when you buy an over-priced box from them (which in itself isn't all that bad - spread of Linux and all that), but they do the following:
+$0 Windows XP
+$49 Redhat (Downloaded)
+$## Redhat Boxed Set
And so on.
Unless there's a legal catastrophe, open source software is not going away. Unlike Apple Computer, it doesn't need to make money, and therefore it doesn't need mass popularity. It only needs to interest the creators. The reason it will always exist is that many people, for very good reason, prefer no secrets in their software, prefer adherence to standards, prefer the security of public testing and code review, and prefer not to be at the legal and financial mercy of the whim of a profit-oriented corporation.
Gradually, open source software will leak into the mainstream. There's no reason to hurry. It has all the time in the world.
I would tend to agree; the great majority of my undergraduate computer work was done under linux. Heck, one teacher wouldn't accept any code unless it ran correctly on the Solaris server. (There were several servers running various flavors of *nix) As far as I can recall, I only used Windows for one programming project the entire 4 1/2 years.
Twenties Retirement
Here are some folks who are doing a great job distributing free software for Windows!
Cygwin is a shared lib (DLL) that simplifies porting of unix software. IHNRTS (I Have Not Read The Source) but most functionality shouldn't be slowed down more than maybe a fraction of a percent.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
On my campus, Windows XP sells for 5 dollars and Office XP Professional sells for 10 dollars. THis started last year with an agreement with Microsoft. Needless to say, the Linux User Group here has completely disappeared. There is no need for anyone to use Linux over XP. Very sad indeed...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Especially if you're going to continue to refer to the overwhelming majority of users with terms like "Average Joe", "Joe Sixpack" and some of the other "amusing" terms I've seen on /.
The major thing that people need to realize is that OSS zealots are like communists. Before you think this is a flame, hear me out. :)
Communists believed in a economic model. They believed that the economic model was an inevitable fate in which the world would eventually resolve itself into as a part of evolution of society. Disregarding the model itself, those who supported communism went a step beyond just believing that it was inevitable but instead tried to force "progress forward". The end result was dictatorships and regimes which have and are crumbly. The anti-communist movement was the same, pushing against communism under the banner that communism was doomed to fail, yet they were too fearful to let it end itself. Neither communist or anti-communist were well received by non-party members.
Zealots pushing OSS most often believe that OSS is an inevitable result of the commodity nature of computers and cloning intellectual property. The simple fact is, individuals will make the choice to use OSS. You can make the choice and even provide it as an option, but forcing it upon people makes your position about OSS seem weaker. It also insults people. If you, a competent individual was able to decide on OSS because you realized that it was the right way for yourself, then others will too. Remember, communism fell/is falling from within, not because of external wars fought by zealots.
I agree. Show me the OS software that has the completion features like VS does (type cout. and it pops up the members) and the function argument lists (after you type cout.ignore( it shows the overloads with argument names and types).
Flame me for not being a "real programmer" if you'd like, but I very much like being able to type less and make sure that what I am doing is what I think and not have to wait until compile time to discover I swapped 2 arguments or typed ignoer instead of ignore.
I believe Eclipse has such a completion feature.
:wq
So, as long as MS has businesses in their back pocket, they've got little need to worry about competing with free, as in freedom, software.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Here's the bigger question: should we even try to sell Linux to the average Joe?
.EXE files off of Kazaa, or its Linux P2P equivalent).
Sure, it may be more secure. But is that only until the masses start moving in that direction and warrant it more attention? Furthermore, the average Joe thinks that every fatal error and delayed pop-up ad is a virus, given the state of paranoia and misinformation out there right now. I don't see Linux alleviating those concerns, or making them any less stupid (i.e. downloading
Sure, it may have great compatibility that's getting better all the time with emulators and such. But is that any consolation to the average person that wants everything to run out-of-box and is confused by options and settings that aren't explicitly explained every step of the way?
Finally, sure, it might get more user friendly, but it's never going to be Windows. When I teach people how to use computers (mostly older folks), I always try to teach them a simplified version of what's going on when they perform an action using relevant analogies, rather than just telling them to click on the Start menu and scroll up to Programs. My thinking is that if you actually understand the basic processes that are going on, computers are essentially demystified and become simple tools rather than theoretical gadgetry removed from reality.
Most of them don't want any part of it. They just want step-by-step instructions that will work every time, reliably, and quickly. They want to know that double clicking on Internet Explorer will open up Google (which I have conveniently preset as the initial page) and let them search the Internet, or that if they want to type stuff they double-click on the Word icon I conveniently set up on the top-right of the desktop. If this changes just one bit (i.e. they accidentally dragged the Word icon to the bottom-right of the desktop), I will assuredly be getting phone calls. Getting out of their familiar behavioral methodology with Windows would be very time consuming and probably not worth the money that's saved by going the Linux route.
And even more seriously, it breaks the golden rule of never, ever messing with command prompts and complicated looking jargon. I have enough trouble convincing them that clicking OK to a licensing agreement or deleting a Word file won't wipe their hard drive.
I work in a software firm dealing with BFSI products.I recently tried my best to sell the idea of doing some testing and development on Linux. Im so sorry for him that he doesn't realize that the world is changing. Rather he want to play safe and doesn't want to take a risk by trying something new.
I was desperately searching for some links comparing Solaris and Linux ( link which proves that linux is as stable or better ).
They gave me a win2k machine. I find it stable ( never crashed ). (But I miss my RH7.2).
Ive installed cygwin and use vim as my editor, i refused to use the standard IDE's of the company and am trying to educate ( impress ) my colleagues with how easy it is to use vim, cygwin etc. Because I agree that the best way to change mindsets it to let them use the open source tools from their comfortable environment ( M$ products ).
Just because it's free-as-in-speech doesn't mean you can't charge for it. If Joe Average Consumer doesn't trust a product that costs nothing, then either hide that fact from him, or explicitly charge him for it (you're allowed to charge whatever you think the market will bear for the binaries, as long as you make the source available for a reasonable fee). If you're in the business of selling stuff, then for Todd's sakes sell it, don't try to convince people that they should accept it for free on philosophical grounds. Don't even bring up the whole issue. Why should Joe A. Consumer care what OS is on his machine as long as he can surf the web and send email?
Marklar: marklar
Linux maybe great, but until well known names run on the platform, you can forget it. I am not talking hardware, but software. I got so fed up with my Win98 box three years ago I switched to SuSE 6.4 and was happy. Then a year ago, I bought my iBook when it became clear that while OS soultions were progressing, I still needed Photoshop and MS Office. I've been more than happy with my iBook and tell people if they are going to purchase a new desktop, especially just for checking email, surfing, basic word/excel stuff, to buy a mac. For desktop use, Apple has come to play and is beating Linux badly. I know more linux people that switched to OSX than from windows to X or Linux. I am now an IT director for a small company that owns several dozen public access terminals that currently run Win2Kpro with a custom kiosk app. In my first week, we pulled half the HD's and had to clone them with Norton Ghost because people DLed programs they should not have been in the first place. I found a replacement in the Linux Based FirecastOS that we are testing over the next 30 days. If that doesn't work out, then I am going to begin to develop a custom solution using RH 9. (well it will proably be PHP or PERL based so should work on any *iux enviroment) We bought the $40 copy of RH 9 from Best Buy so I could show it to him and the number of times I got the, "Are you sure we can install this on as many boxes as we want with having to buy any more licenses?" In our case, Linux offers a great solution, but guess what, joe Q. public will be using Linux on our terminals and not know the difference. So long as they can surf the net and check their hotmail accounts, they don't give a *&#$9. We are in works to see about putting a "This terminal is powered by Linux" ad button. We currently have one box in the field we are test marketing. And when users are asked if they knew they were using Linux, they mostly say no. Then when asked what they thought, its "Well I could check my email, its what agian?" If photoshop (Sorry GIMP doesn't cut it), Dreamweaver, and maybe a couple other widely used apps made it to Linux (like Maya has for 3D artists), then people might be willing to make the jump. Ask most Mac users if they know that FreeBSD is under the hood, and they will say "Free what? It runs iMovie, and this iTunes is cool. Word and Powerpoint work better than on Windows." Now as a server OS, I still deploy FreeBSD before Linux for most uses. I guess its a personal thing, but FreeBSD was designed as a Server Platform. While Linux still has that Desktop/Server dual personality issue to work out.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
We use open source in our work, hence we feel we should give something back.
But isn't there any real bottom-line motivation? For example, I can see the value of improving an open source application for one's own use. I also see the intrinsic interest of programming. Once that's done, then sending out one's own code has virtually zero cost and could have several personal advantages:
1) recognition
2) the modification may be incorporated in future releases, saving the trouble of having to re-improve each new release.
3) free peer review and testing
4) as a contributor, you may be a "favored" customer of the OSS project leader next time you report a problem.
5) Someone may improve on your improvement.
Open source software development could in some ways be like Usenet discussion. You can sit back and lurk, or you can contribute to the discussion. You don't need to contribute for altruistic reasons or to "give something back"; there are tremendous advantages to contributing.
1) ego boost
2) it was on your mind, you wanted to get it off your chest
3) people answer and maybe teach you something
4) you can steer discussion in a direction that interests you
OSS-development-as-public-discussion could provide at least some intuition boosting to help explain how it is possible that it persists despite the lack of direct financial advantage.
Maybe all that OSS needs is the realization that secrecy does not confer very much advantage. People are going to code their own software anyway; companies are going to pay their own internal developers to develop software for company use anyway; the only addition that OSS needs is that people choose to make their source freely available. There is virtually zero direct cost in that, the only significant cost being a loss of competitive advantage if one's direct competitors get a hold of the software. But how significant is that loss, really?
LOl "Windoze"! How originaL!
How about this approach:
...for $100 to $200 less.
Show a customer a computer with Windows pre-installed on it. Then show them the same computer with Linux pre-installed on it...
If they don't respond to that, then I'm afraid they won't respond to anything.
Or am I grandly oversimplifying the issue?
I disagree that the time has past for the Linux Desktop - People will always consider an alternative. Rather, the issue is twofold: Foremost - when was the last time you saw a Linux advertisement that was in the local flyers from BestBuy/etc? Word of mouth is the best advertising, but the geek market tends to only talk to itself which renders word of mouth almost useless for the market intended to reach. Secondly - a major of the OS apps out there are betas compared to what one sees on Windows. Poor installers (much less uninstallation), meagre documentation, dependency issues... All stop Joe Average when confronted with these realities. To ever make a competitive desktop, these need to be addressed. Until that time, Linux will continue to be the elitist OS of choice.
On the agreement side with the article, yes, Open Office will sure brings users to open source idea and move users farther from M$.
However, I cannot understand what differences does it make from principle point of view on Open Office and Linux. They're technically a different app for different purpose. Therefore, you can not say from that observation that using Open Office to entice users away from Windows is more effective because it's an application. There are a lot more to it. I think it's because Linux is not good enough (as a platform), not because it's an OS. Also, average Joe does not understand what open source or GNU is, but he would understand a different between $0 bill and $200 bill.
Here's my take on this. The reason people does not use Linux is because the driver list although much better, still not enough. Modem, printers, scanner, etc. are not all supported easily by average Joe or the hardware suppliers.
Linux is not Windows. Learn from M$ strategy with I.E. Initially, they made it very similar to Netscape. Such as the menu, menu items, buttons (what buttons, and where they are position), etc. (embrace the technology and users' experience). When they got enough market share, they changed to whatever they would like. So, Linux should provide an interface as similar to Windows as possible without Legal problem. Down to every single click or feel and touch. (and add improvements if wishes)
Next, games, and other common apps still are not user friendly or exist on Linux. After all, buying a computer or OS is to run things, not looking at the OS.
Every windows CD burners apps I have, I could just install and run, and it would burn my CD. I have failed to get any app. to burn into my CD on Linux. That's an example of easy of use.
I know command line and Unix before Linux. I install Linux, develop under Linux without any problem. And I still run Windows. You expect average Joe to use Linux? Not until those things are solved.
Modem driver. Yes, driver again. Each time a new RH version came out, I have to upgrade my driver. Even the dot dot dot version. That's not true for windows. Yes, it crashes, it's bad. But most of the driver works (until they change from dos base to Nt base). Also, most app works from 98 to xp. Also, the library (DLL hell) works. This is a sharp contrast to Linux library. Seems that a new version of GCC, you have to recompile things. Users will not like that.
The graphical interface. It's so slow. I used to use a 66 MHz Mac. Yes, diff arch. cannot be compared with each other. But you are talking about 66MHz and 550MHz, or 1GHz here. The 66 MHz Mac gave me a smooth graphics on windowing. Then open Eudora email was quick. Then I could play 3D Wolfenstein game then. Amazing. Here, with the 2.56 GHz Pentium 4, I can not play the Penguin game smoothly (the one that eat fish). Folders, apps. open much more slower than windows (take Mozillar and Open Office on both platform, and you'll know.) Linux start up also very slow (even you disable most of the services).
Seems alot of rants eh? I know, it's hard reality to swallow. I like Linux, and I want it to be used everywhere. But reality kicks in, and if you don't face it, it will take longer for Linux to be as wide spread as windows today.
Some of the best software out there is created by hobbyists, but with something as complex as a complete office suite, it does help to have a big staff of full-time developers working on it.
Actually, the mostly hobby-project, KOffice, seems poised to overtake OpenOffice in the not so distant future. In my opinion, it is overall a better written collection of software--even if the MS compatiblity is currently lacking. OOo seems to me a twisted heap of code with an insane learning curve confronting possible new developers. And regardless, final result is a buggy, slow, monolithic application. It kinda surprises me that Sun actually paid good money for it.
Uhm. What does free software have to with religion? Did the previous poster even mention the religion of the concerned party?
I would really like to hear your <snicker>logic</snicker>.
Really ?
Here in Bergen CompSci students come pretty close to use nothing but open source software, and when I say pretty close, the main exception is Solaris.
Windows was never popular, why would it be, it does not even come with a usable development-toolchain.
If they don't know what "device" means, they shouldn't be using Linux. I sure hope they stay teh hell of my INTARWEB!!
Why would salesmen possibly be excited about something they can't make a margin on?
alex
the issue is attempting to satisfy differnet
users (of different levels of skills) at
once! I understand you prefer that the installation
process by more idiot-friendly, but if it was
satisfactory to you, it would not be
satisfactory to me -- I have at least 15 years
experience with Unix.
Although it is hard to please everyone,
I wander whether they asked you during install
if you are willing to let them make most decisions for
you. They cannot make all decisiions for you,
unless the OS comes pre-intalled, so some
trouble must be expected by default.
I exclusivelly sell Linux products and it is a hard sell. The Open Source community do not really concentrate on Wine but this is probably the most important technology for selling Linux.
Reasons are:
1. People are afraid of change - They wan't to use their own legacy software even if there is something better out their. We have to allow them to change at their own pace.
2. It would in the minds of my clients prove that Open Source software is worth it if we can emulate Windows.
3. Clients do not lose their current investment in software.
My opinion is that Linux is growing slower than it can, purelly because of the lack of a free way of running Windows (that is already purchased) on their PC when buying Linux.
Once Linux can be run (and it is part of the standard distrutions) without needing dual boot it will not make a difference to the client if you load Windows or Linux on their PC.
Apples new IDE xCode thankfuly will finally have this feature.
Larger organizations don't care about who is selling open source software (most of it can be freely downloaded from the Internet anyway) but they DO care about who is going to give support for the product afterwards.
So I think the questions should be "How to support open source software", from a services point of view.
Quite a few years ago Taco Bell sold basic tacos for 25 cents. Consumers had the impression of Taco Bell that the food was crap. So Taco Bell comissioned a study of how to increase consumer's view of their products. The answer was to raise their prices. So Taco Bell raised the prices of their tacos to 79 cents. It wasn't long before consumers had a much better view of Taco Bell food.
This anonymous coward's wife won't touch Linux. Going from Windows 3.1 to Win95 was bad enough ... transition to Win98 was easier...but she ain't budging anymore ... no Linux, MacOS or Win 2k ... she doesn't care or want to know!
It almost sounds like how can you fool customers into buying open-source software. You cant . If you modify/enhance/simplify your application using open-source software, peeps would have no problem in buying it, In fact they will queue to get it. You dont have to read dummies guide for push-down-the-throat open source software. My 2 rupees... err 2 cents :)
Why do you try to explain the concept of Free Software in you 30 something seconds you have for a sale?
RedHat, Suse et al are "free" but you have to pay money for them. Just tell them that this is an alternate OS, which costs x$. Tell them that this is a little bit cheaper than windows but because of the exellent price/performance ratio with Linux you get more bang for less bucks.
You don't start an one hour presentation why the concept of closed source is flawed just because you want to sell a copy of Windows.
Tell them what they need to know, not the arcane details of a disscusion only Richard Stallman (sp?) can understand...
KISS is the motto of the day!
You really want to sell Linux to the average Joe? You want the masses to understand what Open Source software is really about? Start a TV commercial marketing campaign with groovy catch phrases and a touch of humor. Of course there is always the issue of how this is going to get paid for... who's got the big bucks around here?
Now, you won't be able to explain what Open Source is in a 15 second commercial, or even a 30 second commercial. But you will have the curiosity of the masses, and the word 'Linux' in the vocabulary of the average American Joe, which is all you really need.
Linux Geek
While that is a huge simplification, it's a good point especially with cheaper computers that you can get for a couple of hundred bucks. There the fractional cost of Windows is quite significant. Moreover, those machines are not aimed at the most serious users, but for simple things like web and email, so the lack of Windows applications is less of a problem.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
control all software
Must be bought.
That's preety much like saying: I want to draw a sword through my heart but I don't want to die in the process...
how long until
You've got great intentions, but www.openoffice.org doesn't come through. I just went there as a customer hoping to find a download button for an OpenOffice installable binary that will run on Win98, and all I saw was a blinding haze of links with country names all over them. It's probably there somewhere, but I couldn't find it.
To compete with Microsoft Office, www.openoffice.org is going to need a big red clickable star with "FREE Download OpenOffice NOW!" in white lettering on the front page on it, and when you click the button, you immediately start downloading an installable .exe file for windows. And that's the truth.
While it would be nice to be able to gain market share among average users, as others have pointed out, there are still significant obstacles. (ease of use, lack of games, no consistent single UI style, lack of compatibility with every digital camera, etc.)
While working to overcome these obstacles, it seems the real marketing and development focus should be aimed at markets where desktop linux would be useful and don't offer as many obstacles.
Markets such as small businesses, grade schools and high school administration, larger businesses that use computers for data entry, point of sale machines, etc, all don't care about many of the issues that are obstacles to mainstream users.
The guy - while writing an interessting article - misses one point which makes his argumentation a bit void: Windoze People know the concept of free software.
They use Freeware and Shareware (with some keys from the internet *g*) regularily, since years. So they are used to the concept of "giving quality Software away for free".
Of course neither Freeware nor Shareware are Open-Source; but in regard of this articles line of argumentation they are free enough to make the writers conclusion wrong. From the point of average Joe Doe there is no big difference between OpenOffice.org and any other Freeware-Thingy.
IMHO thats not the reason Joe Doe rejects Linux.
Lets talk about games, about ease-of-use, about MS-interoperability.. and about what Joe Doe might have heard from his friends about this points..
Well, speaking for myself, I don't, and for a whole lot of reasons.
The first reason is that open source software is written to scratch the itches of people competent enough to write it. It must be, because people who are not competent enough to write operating systems by definition don't write operating systems; and, unless you're being paid to, you don't write programs to do things you've no interest in doing. So Linux will always be a geeks operating system, and will only ever be good as a geeks operating system, and that's how it should be.
If, in some act of self-denying humanitarian madness, the Linux community did turn round and make Linux into an operating system for Joe Average to use, we would just by doing that make it an operating system which was not comfortable for us to use, and so we'd all drift away to using something else and there would be no-one left to maintain or develop Linux.
Joe Average is inevitably going to have to continue to buy operating systems which people get paid to write, because there is no-one who is motivated to build a Joe Average Operating System ('JAOS'?) for free. Microsoft seem to perform this function perfectly well.
Of course the corporate (and government) desktop is different, because large organisations can afford to pay sysadmins to tune an operating system to the needs of the organisation, and lock it down so that the lusers can't make a mess with it. They're going to have to do this anyway whatever operating system they choose, so they might as well start with a free one.
Obviously, there's some benefit for us in Linux being more widely used. The bigger the community, the greater the number of contributers, the more software there is that's available to us. Great. But actually there's even more benefit to us in letting a thousand flowers bloom. The more heterogenous the operating systems in common everyday use, the more important interoperability is, and the less possible it is for wannabe-monopolists to 'embrace and extend', or to save files by default in proprietary formats.
So don't - don't - strive, campaign, persuade or even hope to see Linux on every desktop. It won't do us any good and it won't do Joe Average any good. Strive instead to expose Joe Average to a wider range of options he can understand. Let's face it, Mac OS X is a good operating system for Joe Average - at least as good as Windows - and once the Joe Average desktop market begins to fragment there will be more chance for new operating systems to emerge and break in there, and that can only be interesting for us.
And yes, perhaps, in future, we will see JAOSes emerging which are based on Linux; perhaps Lindows is the first of those. But please, we don't want Linux to become a JAOS. That's in no-one's interest.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Perhaps when KDE first started up you could have a newb option - "are you a new linux user?". This would then give a reduced menu of programs with some informative tooltips that describe any analogues (ie if it's equivalent to an MS product)and the function of the program.
This is pretty much how GNU and Linux/BSD beat commercial linux in the '90s. Where I used to work, we used Solaris for everything. But as we needed it to do more and more, we installed more and more Free applications---Sendmail, Apache, BIND, gcc, emacs, etc. The quality of those applications built our confidence in the quality of Free Software in general. Eventually we were just using Solaris as a platform for running Free software. In mailing lists and other discussion groups, it became clear that this Free software was mostly developed on Free operating systems, and so would probably run better there. Before long, we started switching things over to Linux.
This is exactly the right strategy for getting people away from Windows. Unfortunately, it requires doing a lot of development work on Windows, which is just plain no fun. I think that's why we aren't seeing this strategy take firmer hold.
My Web Page
Highly visible supporters in positions of power at the big game companies.
Imagine if some guy at Valve Software decided to release a Linux version of Half-Life 2 a couple of weeks before the Win32 version? I'm not saying that people would switch, but it'd certainly bring good press and make lots of people curious (and I doubt that they'd lose money doing that -- the Win32 people would still buy it despite the frustration).
Hell, no need for that; just hire a couple of extra guys to make sure that a Linux port of the game is available at the official release (both in the same box).
Gamers are a good target demographic for now because they usually know more about computers than the typical MS office-user and most distros of Linux still aren't that user-friendly.
Of course the hardware support would need to be better and... well, who am I kidding. This will not happen.
I'm sure that lots of programers are Linux fans but the publisher probably has the last say on the matter of allocating ressource for this kind of stuff. If it isn't where the money is, well...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Those looks like servers to me - the previous poster was talking about the students own machines.
Quote the poster:
;-)
"
In order to increase market share, these are the people who need to be sold on open-source. Currently there are not very many college students in CS or CompE that use open-source development products. In order to stay competitive, open-source must go out of its way to recruit these youngsters and give them the opportunity to try out open-source. This should happen at both the college and high school level.
This can be a real advantage to open-source as there are so many projects that these students can contribute on. It's a win-win situation. They get real-world hands on experience and open-source gets more coders and people dedicated to open-source philosophies.
"
Spoken like a true marketer. The buzzwords alone will stamp down all competition from Microsoft and get them running back to Mom. Nice
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The solution is simple: charge money. Lot's of people do this and make a very good living. They've even stopped mentioning Linux as a prime component of their software because people (here in germany) allready know that Linux is free. But if you look at products like icoya or powerslave, both wich are based almost entirely on free software then you'll see the following: Consitent redos of branding, a little company of people who support their stuff and prices up to 15000$. And a team of highly motivated marketing folks. All for a bundle of OSS with some gluecode and a function extra here and there.
And the people are happy to pay and have a good feeling, 'cause sharepoint portal server comes at something like 10 times the amount of money. With less functionality.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Check any of these:
www.simply.co.uk
www.watford.co.uk
These and other sites is where the average user buys (not Dell or HP, those are for corporate users). These are companies advertised in Magazines of wide circulation in the UK.
In both cases the OS is charged and you save money if you don't buy it.
It is a real pity that they don't have (yet) a box with Linux on it showing an increase of 0 (or a nominally lower increase of price) when selected.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You realise Safari is KDE konqueror ported to OSX, right?
I would dispute VS's superiority, once you've used Eclipse or netbeans you see it's nothing special.
I in the other hand invested a bit of time to learn Linux, in exchange I have a computer that always works and that I understand what it is doing.
I know that if I need a new network card I should buy a supported one which will be recognized automatically.
Knowledge is power, and this exemplifies it perfectly: you have delegated knowledge into others, thus they hold the power (you are the person having to react to external events, fearing about DRM).
I decided to make the knowledge mine and now MS would need to come begging to me with applications for Linux for me to even consider making business with them. By investing some time in learning I have shifted the knowledge in my advantage, leveraging OSS in my benefit has saved me money and headaches.
Oh yes, and when I want to play games I go and a buy a 2nd hand console, which is much better suited for the task and does not demand outrageous hardware upgrades with each new game that comes into the market.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Really?
Then how do you explain the cottage industry that exists around teaching Windows stuff?
We have academies, books, videos, interactive CDs, corporate training, all of them trying to explain Windows to the masses. Why? Because the thing is damn confussing. When you have something truly easy to use there is no busineess in explaining how it works.
This only shows that what Goebels said is true: "repeat a lie enough times and it will become true". The lie here is tha MS software is easy to use. The millons of dollars poured into training people to use Windows stuff demonstrates this without the shadow of a doubt. The marketing team at MS deserves every penny they earn, they have created a myth that even many technologically minded people believe in spite of copious evidence of the contrary.
Fortunately, there is also that saying that says "you can't fool all the people all the time".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You nominally compare IDEs and then you don't name any bona fide IDEs on the open source side. Have you taken a look at either Kdevelop or Eclipse? I don't really know Eclipse, but it's gotten very good reviews from others, and I do know Kdevelop has gotten very good in the last couple of versions. It certainly has method-completion, though I'm not sure about the function argument tooltips.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
I wanr Linux in as many computers as possible.
Why?
Because then I will find more hardware (not that I miss anything), more support (not that I need any) and more applications (I miss nothing at the moment).
And because in such situation big companie would be forced to provide a better product and service, treating us like valuable clients and not like possible copyright infringers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some of us have long memories and extreme hatred for spammers. I guess Sun is about even now, but that hardly makes them worth special praise. Just not a target... Hopefully they put themselves back on track.
Sun -2: Spamming
Once upon a time, Sun hired Harte-Hanks ad agency. They spammed selling Sun products with a Sun mailing list using an open Listserv (just imagine the reply fun, ugh).
Sun +3: Sun make StarOffice Available to All
Sun -2: Sun takes StarOffice away
Sun +1: Supporting OpenOffice
It's good to have support for good open source applications, but why not just open up StarOffice again?
Amen brother. Anyone who wants the "man on the street" opinion - read the following: If you REEEEEAlly want to win over the average joe and penetrate into the MS monopoly on the desktop, you HAVE to address (1) hardware compatability, and (2) ease of software setup, use, troubleshooting, problem resolution. 1st, backgrounders and qualifiers: I am a smart guy. I make almost 3 figures, I have a 4 year degree and am just shy of a masters. I work for one of the big computer companies. Our department's system admin reports to me. I hate microsoft's abuse of their monopoly. I aboslutely love the concept of Linux and open source. I use open office at home as well as MozillaFirebird. I have tried and tried again to use Linux as my primary OS both at home and work, but quite frankly its a big pain in the A$$. Sure the hardware detection is getting better all the time, and the software tools are improving as well, but 3 huge mountains still remain: (1) compatibility with MS networks, (2) support for cutting edge hardware, and (3) cutting edge software titles available to Linux (ProE, Autocad, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator). In spite of everything you will try to flame me with please listen to this: I don't want to fsck with a command line to configure my PC - I want to click the dam menu and *bam* be done. I don't want to fsck with my hardware trying to get Linux to like it - I just want to plug the dam thin in and tell it where the drivers are (assuming it doesn't already recognize it). I want to be able to open the help center, type "setup samba" and have it provide step by step instructions not say things like "go to 1234.org and read the manual pages for more info" or "you may have to recompile your kernel". Quite frankly I don't give a rat's butt about kernels or .orgs. I want to use a tool and have it work. I want to buy a piece of hardware, plug it in, load the drivers from CD and use the dam thing. I will pay someone for that privilege. MS understands that, however evil their little hearts are.
THIS is why Linux can't break the "average joe" barrier.
I LOVE what you guys do, I DO want you do succeed. Please understand that the market you are trying to penetrate REQUIRES that you jump the above mentioned hurdles.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Don't know why people always push FREE software. It's not about free as in beer for me. It's about OpenSource. OpenSource programers work there ass off and they should be payed for it!!! I do!
Ehh? you're on crack? Autocompletion is a feature in lots of IDEs. (Best autocompletion is found in CodeWarrior btw). One more thing, the Visual C++ compiler is utter crap. As late as one year ago it wasn't even ISO compliant (bet it still isn't)
Why can't they make a margin on it? GPL does not forbid the selling of software, all it says is that if you want to sell the software then you need to provide the source code.
So basically what that means is that you can do what you like with the app, sell it or give it away, you just have to attach the source.
And in the office it's easy to create a bogus TCO report. We've seen several prime examples of that here. It's easy to trick bosses into thinking it will actually be cheaper just because you don't have to pay a licensing fee.
Of course I'm assuming that we're talking about free software, not just necessarilly open source.
scott
Well that's not true at least at my school.
I go to Hartwick College and the only time we used the microsoft development tools was for one class on visual programming, everything else has been done in linux with gcc or java. All programs for class need to be uploaded to a linux server, and it's pretty much required to learn the OS (though I had experience before I went to college, as I found a lot of other people did as well.)
Hi,
I think there is a big misunderstanding in the way you use the word "free" in "open source free software".
Free is not there for "it costs nothing and you can have it for nothing too", it means our business model is base uppon the fact that we want to produce apps in an open environnement where anybody can enhance the code and contribute so that the application can be bugfixed, tested, extended etc... in the best possible way.
Look at mozilla for example.
It doesn't mean that it costs nothing to produce (Mozilla developers are paid engeneers.). It doesn't mean that their should be no support or documentation.
Look at MySQL, you can download the source, compile and enjoy. On the other hand, a large company can pay for installation, support, doc and maintenance although this is still free software.
In the end there will always be end users who need a service beyond the software and will be OK to pay for it. They don't care for the source code, they want a build that works and install flawlessly with an industry level documentation and possible technical support.
I think that the open source development model ensure the best possible software, look at mozilla for a strong example.
Don't forget: free does not mean no cost or no value !!!!!!!
Not UNC-Chapel Hill though Unix is an established server OS. UNC has a deal with Microsoft ensuring that all of the intro computer classes (officially) teach on Microsoft products. Linux is very much an underground thing there. I was able to convince the TA to let me turn in my work from a Linux development environment (which would compile with blackdown, but not with MS's JDE). He was pretty nice about it for an emacs user. :-)
Case history: I was working a short-term writing contract in a Windows-only company. The job would require editing photos, so I asked them to install the GIMP for me, pointing out that it was freely usable and the equivalent proprietary program would be about $600. I also asked them to install Open Office so I could use it for labelling photos and making drawings. The only question they asked was whether things would be in standard file formats. I think they had been burned before by proprietary formats.
Several weeks went by, and one of the assembly workers mentioned he just bought a PC for his kids, but software was REALLY expensive. I offered to give him a CD with GIMP and OO and Mozilla (and NetHack!) ... explained it's not only free but legal, and he could give copies away or install it anywhere he wants to. Within a week, a couple of others asked me if they can have "that free software", or if I knew of free software to do ___. Viral marketing was starting to infect the company.
The mechanical engineer whose office I was working in took a GIMP/OO CD, then asked about OSS engineering software to use in his engineering classes. I told him that most of the good stuff was written for Linux. He was curious, installed the distro I gave him (probably Mandrake) one weekend, and came back with one question - "what about my data?" I showed him that OO could read EXCEL and Word files ... his next statement was "So what the hell do I need Windows for?" I pointed out that his major drafting software was going to release a Linux version, and that he could ask for that upgrade instead fo the Windows one, so soon he could be totally free of Windows at work and at home.
The third to convert, although very cautiously, was the bean counter who doubled as sysadmin (very good admin, far from clueless). I had already saved him $600 with the GIMP, and the OSS for WIn CD was getting rave reviews on the factory floor, so he trusted that I knew what I was talking about. They desperately need manufacturing control and CRM software. It's extremely expensive, seldom works the way a business needs it to work, and getting it customized is more expensive if you can get them to do it at all. I suggested he look at the Compiere project as the least painful way to introduce it. It has a web-based server interface and is aimed at small businesses. It does require an $1800 Oracle run-time license, but that and the cost of customizing is way less than the cost of a proprietary system and the hardware to run it on. He could use an old PC to install Linux/Apache and test it out for free - I gave him Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix. The last I heard, they had hired someone to install and customize Compiere for them. Everyone will be using browsers and their existing systems (Win 95/98/2K) to access it, but it's one Linux server in the door.
The key to my success was not talking vaguely about the virtues of open source operating systems ... it was handing over an OSS solution to the person's current problem.
Just dont't sell it to Joe.
I think Linux and most OSS is great. And I would love if everybody was using something Linux compatible. But do they really have to know it?
Linux,GNU and whatever other OSS you have are great semi-manufactured articles but Joe just dont care, he wants the final product.
My experience was different.
When I was in graduate school just a few years ago, only one prof ran a Linux desktop, and I here he's since gone to WinXP.
When we were putting a group project report on the web (using my student account, all of which were on a *nix box) the other two members of my group took copious notes of how file permissions worked and how to manipulate them with chmod. These were graduate students in CS who, AFAICT, had never seen *nix before. This was '97.
Our client/server lab was NT, and I got the distinct impression that the only thing most students knew was Windows.
I was also a TA for one term, teaching 3 of 15 labs. Three sections were on the Mac, the others on Windows. I wanted to volunteer for all three Mac sections (my undergrad made me a Mac-head) but couldn't arrange the schedule, and the other TA gave the impression that he was doing Macs only because he had no option.
So, even among budding computer professionals, Windows is entrenched. I was shocked to find out I was one of the few people comfortable in Mac, *nix, and Windows environments.
Constitutionally Correct
i really like the idea of a joe average operating system, but you're missing the piont. joe average doesnt want a joe average operating system he wants a joe average computer, and counldnt give a monkeys how it works, so long as it does. computers are tools nothing more. Microsoft products offer people a perfectly adequate out of the box solution that beyond pressing the windows update button they need not think about until the time comes to retire their PC. Open source is meaningless to the average joe because they neither want nor need to access source code. telling they why they want open source and why its can be better - the whole cathedral and bazzar arguement - isn't in my experience goiong to get you very far. If you tell them that its free and works better than microsoft they might be interensted, but nobody likes change. think of lusers as a third world country, and then start thinking about what technology is appropriate, not the coolest or the best.
a man of infinite shallows
OK. You have two commercial OS's.
First you have MS. They hate open-source software, they want to kill Linux, they won't make any products for Linux.
Second, you have Apple. They like open-source, they use open-source, the need open-source. Without software like Apache, CUPS, GCC, Samba, etc. they're in trouble.
I think average users need a commercial OS and the installation ease and large support infrastructure that a commercial software company can provide. So I support Apple as you consumer OS provider because they NEED open-source, and so they're going to support it and expose people to it. And avoid Microsoft because they HATE open source and will do everything they can to belittle it, cripple it, and eventually destroy it.
I haven't used Eclipse or netbeans. I'll have to check them out, especially if they are as good as Visual Studio.
And no, Safari is not Konqueror ported to OSX. Safari's Webcore is KHTML ported to OSX, and *very much improved.* I use Konqueror at home (no OSX there, only Linux), and Safari renders many, many more pages correctly. Hopefully the next version of Konq will use Apple's changes to KHTML.
And that's just the core. Safari's interface is much superior to Konqueror's, at least for web pages (Konq handles other things besides the web; it's also KDE's default local file browser). Safari's googlebar, tabbed browsing, status bar, and bookmarks are all just great. I take issue with the brushed metal, but hey, there are hacks around that.
I've used Konqueror, Mozilla, Chimera/Camino, MSIE (Mac and Windows), Phoenix/Firebird, and Safari extensively, and occasionally Opera and Galeon, and Safari is by far the best from what I've seen. YMMV.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
So you're advocating that open source authors get paid from either locally-collected (as in the case of libraries) or nationally-collected (as is the case of NPR and PBS) taxes?
Or that they should have their software, for a two-week period every six months, interrupt what your doing every few hours with modal dialog boxes that block your work until you pledge more money (as PBS and most public radio do)?
I think we all understand what I mean when I use the "blindfolded monkey" hyperbole. Let's not take things too literally.
With regard to training products and institutes, it seems to me that they understandably adopt the commercially intelligent position of "Whew, boy - - this stuff is hard. Good thing you have us to show you how to sum an Excel column!!" If you look carefully into the faces of people attending, say, MS Office training classes, what you see is an expression only a few brain waves away from sleep. Is it hard to use these products? For the most part, no. Are employees often sent to stultifying training courses because their employers want to "get more from their software investment? Yep. It's not about the software being hard to use.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
You make less than $100 a year? Wow. You've got to be pretty smart to live on that little.
You're some kind of manager and you make less than $100 per year? Wow!
Open source software sells YOU!
Why not burn a few ISO's and either offer to install it for them for an install fee of 1/2 an hour's labor or sell them the CD for $10-30?
Is it because it doesn't fit into the Circuit City business procedures? Because they would have to support it if they offered it?
What term would you reccommend as shorthand to refer to those users who aren't IT experts and basically just want a system that works? You could go with the old favourites of John Doe, Joe Soap, Fred Bloggs or their feminine equivalents. But those are rather over used in other areas to refer to 'Someone, we don't know who'.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
I find the easiest and most effective way to explain OSS and why Linux is great is to liken it to a collaborative scientific project like the human genome project or the race to cure cancer. The public has been conditioned for years by movies, tv, and print to wrap their heads around the idea of thousands of scientists in white lab coats using their enormous brains to create things that are great for industry and humanity. And to some extent the public has come to grasp that that's how the Internet itself evolved. So if you tap into that image of hordes of geniuses working for humanity, the reaction goes from "Huh?" to "Wow."
Then you show them quake playing on your linux laptop and hey presto! Instant convert.
However, as a footnote, folks, linux really, really needs to become easier to install/uninstall new programs and to configure if we really want the average Joe to buy in completely...
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Even emacs does completion, with the proper addon packages. You just need to know the correct "M-x sacrifice-goats-and-chant"-style command to scan your files and enable it.
So why not report the pirates?
If the 'dozers I knew had to pay for their Microsoft software, they'd all switch to Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Well, it worked for you until all the commercial software companies stopped developing Amiga software because nobody bought legal copies. Then it was adios, Amiga.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Personally I know they exist because you just told me but I don't currently know how to use them. Me being me I'd probably just go to a commandline and type something like man apt-get or Google for it. That's not what my Mom would do or my sister or most of the people who sit in the same office as me. They're not techies, they just want something that works, they just want to be able to put a CD in their machine and wait for the window to open that will install the software for them if they click a few buttons.
Incidentally, for them install means put the software on the machine and put the icons for it on the desktop and on the 'Start' menu. Command line is a closed book to these people, why should they have to learn how to use it if there's another product that's easier to use? You might be comfortable using the command line, I'm comfortable using the command line, most users aren't.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
I've been trying to preach the same. "Hello, wake up, there's a real world out there". A real world where people won't use Linux unless they are highly motivated to do so for "ethical" reasons, and/or they are tech geeks who just generally want to be better than rest of us and use some techincally obscure operating system your average computer user don't understand anything about. [Yes, I think I am part of both of the groups]
All these posts from people who have converted their friends and acquintances Mozilla/OpenOffice.org users... HOW DID YOU DO THAT??? I've mentioned Mozilla to my friends, installed it into their computers, demontstrated features that I think make it superior to IE, but what do they do when they need web browser next time? Yes, exactly, they click that comfy old IE icon on their taskbar. They just want to use what they've used to and/or they don't care! As pointed out other posters, Windows/IE/Office/Outlook/ already *is* free for them. Why would their waste their precious time to learn to use some new system?
This is sad. This makes me angry, but what can I do? Call them studid? Call them idiots? And that would help my cause how?
Did you read the part where he said that the salespeople loose sales because Office is bundled with a Dell, and people don't want to spend another $400?
I would assume they would be excited because they could make a percentage of those sales they would otherwise loose.
Oh, fuck off. I type that without even realizing it half the time.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I love how you dips continually mod down anything true or incisive as a "troll". This post is right on the mark, and you know it.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Because we're not on commission, however, our sales do go on our records. So, if the salesmen sell more expensive computers because people don't have to worry about an additional $400 in software, it increases our sales.
barzelay.net
No, I'm saying, they don't make a margin on ANY software, GPL or otherwise. If I sell a $400 copy of Office, my store makes about $2. On half the software we sell, we lose money. The retailers don't see hardly any profit from software, but they have to carry it or else risk disappointing customers who are looking for software.
But you are right in that GPL software could conceivably have a higher margin than closed source, since they could sell, for instance, OpenOffice for $30 and therefore make $30 off of it (depending on their agreements and such).
barzelay.net
Really?
Then how do you explain the cottage industry that exists around teaching Windows stuff?
Umm...because the average user is dumber than a blindfolded monkey? ;-)
Okay...haven't seen this really spelled out yet, so here's my $.02. I think right now, what keeps some users from switching to linux (speaking about reasonably computer-savvy folks) is that there's no "Find-download-click-install" routine that's consistent for Linux. Windows has a couple of fairly streamlined installers that make it simple for users to "make things go". If I built a RedHat box for my mom and said "Hey, go install GIMP...I forgot to include it...you can get it at blah.com", she'd likely find the file she needed, download it, and either not be able to find where it went (save to desktop, anyone?), or not be able to figure out how to install it. "tar" is not something that a fairly experienced windows user understands. Usability and quality of applications in Linux has become stellar, but it's time to get everybody on one page and make it REEEEEEEEAAAALLY easy for people to actually install stuff. How many Windows users would have installed if they had to do it via a command-line?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
> "What's the gimmick?" He asked. She proceeded to explain to him about OSS, and he just got more confused
I have the gimmick for you. Originally, FS/OSS started with programmers needing to 'scratch an itch' -- I need this utility, and it doesn't exist, and I'm so anal-retentive that I'm going to write it myself. Then, since other people can benefit from it, I might as well give it away, since I'm a programmer, not a marketing/sales organization.
You can explain that when programmers write programming tools for programming by other programmers. How do you explain this for a from-scratch desktop, a GUI email client, or a web browser?
In fact, I don't know *what* the gut-level motivations are behind various programmers writing these tools which are definitely not what you'd consider 'scratching an itch', at least in the 'something is blocking my work, and I need a utility to keep working'.
There must have been a slashdot topic on this before -- why, genuinely, do you write free software? I mean, don't you have anything better to do with your time (and by extension, how does free software save you time, help you reach your other goals, or help you scratch that itch)?
So you have one less complaint
than you thought you had.
>>Autocompletion is a feature in lots of IDEs.
I know, but I have yet to use an open source program with it. (I have yet to try Eclipse.)
>>One more thing, the Visual C++ compiler is utter crap. As late as one year ago it wasn't even ISO compliant (bet it still isn't)
As of today, there is only *1* compiler that claims to be fully compliant, and that's only with one particular library. (That's Comeau C++ and the Dinkumware library if you're curious.) The new release of VC moves it much closer to compliance with partial template specialization.
final result is a buggy, slow, monolithic application.
That's fine, although I haven't found that to be true on my OOo install. Why is that fine?
MS Office is still (and will continue to be) more buggy, slower, and much more bloated.
This posted to the Newsforge board, but mangled. Repeated here:
;)
We are still firmly in the early adopter stage with Linux on the Desktop. That's a hard thing for me personally because I use Linux all the time. The price of a good distribution is good value. We all know choice is good, trust is good, price is good, performance is good, Linux is good.
I have had some good advocacy success with Open Source applications. People would listen, but lose interest quickly when starting from Linux. Buring a CD full of apps does wonders though. They know how much software costs them and free, legal alternatives have value they can understand.
(I don't sell consumer hardware. My success was getting people I know and work with to try Open Source software.)
I think you are on the right track. Here are a few ideas I thought of that might help you get something out of Open Source while building interest at the same time.
Improve the software bundle and charge them a bit for it. You should get something for your efforts and the customer should get a chance to see value.
One of the problems with free is that free is simply free. It's hard to show the value when they don't see it as part of the transaction. On their receipt, include that bundle as a line item and list all the stuff they are getting.
Positioned right, its an easy sell that adds a small bit to your margin while advocating OSS at the same time. Its even a good sell because you are providing a nice service and some minor, but important education/advocacy at the same time. Both will do them some good and are worth the small price.
You might put together a small printed manual that contains a brief bit of information on each package, where it came from and where the best instructions are located on the system. Setting their default browser and home page to these instructions and introduction might not be a bad idea either.
In that manual, let them know they can support Open Source software efforts, thus getting more of the same sort of value in the future, by purchasing selected hardware items. Get a nice warm fuzzy sending a check to some developers somewhere
This is a bit more work, but building a custom Knoppix CD could add a bit more value as well. Set it up so that it is a emergency tool. Say their machine gets hosed up. They can boot with that CD and use their software tools and still get information from their disk. (Assuming it works)
If they have a problem with the dollars, offer to take the value back toward something else. Do this with a nice printed promotional item. That way some of them will take you up on it, but not all of them.
Finally, if they just want the cheapest machine they can get, give them the chance to just purchase the bundle stand alone. The purchase price can be less than the bundled price and can be used discount toward that copy of Microsoft Office they want. Maybe one of their friends can use the software they got free with Office, or it can be used on the kids machine.
A percentage of these customers are going to discuss their use of these tools with you in the future. Maybe Linux might not be so hard to understand for them after they get past the Free/Open Source issues via use of fine applications.
Blogging because I can...
A post here; [quote] Unless manufacturers start supporting Linux like the way they do windows, we arn't going anywhere. Other then that, porting traditionally Linux tools to Windows is a good idea. [quote] now, if i was a manufacturer, i would worry about my product being treated like a commodity....which is much more likely if it is a port to Linux/Unix than to the MS environment. those guys and girls are not stupid. they know that the Linux/Unix world seems to be one where FREE is the universal mantra... why suport that when your product requires real income by way of sales and profits to match the payroll and your costs of operation? i suspect that the FREE community will have to realize that somethings will always cost money because some company wants to make money. if you don't like that model, then sure... use the FREE approach and do the homework to integrate hardware and software yourself. if you respect the ability of a company to make money selling in this market which is tough, then pay up and buy a product with a more active support and integration approach done before you get the box and software. joe typical customer and ms joe typical customer will gravitate to the solution which fits their abilities and budgets. (btw => our firm uses both solutions for different reasons and that works for us)
" I am a communist yes,"
Communism is itself a repugnant ideology. The application of it has caused atrocities which exceeded those caued by National Socialism (Nazism). Communism is at least as bad as Nazism.
" I believe everyone should be equal"
Then you certainly should not be a communist. Communist systems typically have one super dictator; very stratified.
At best, communism is like religion. Feel free to live your life according to it, but it certainly has no place anywhere in government where it ends up being forced on people who do not subscribe to the ideology, with disastrous results.
Just for the record I'd like to point out that Sun uses StarOffice (OO with a few tweaks) as their corporate standard office environment. Something that is "slow and buggy" wouldn't hang for long in that role.
I have used StarOffice for numerous large technical manuals as well as standard day to day office work, and overall find it to be reasonably fast and stable. Bottom line here is that modern software often requires modern HW whether you are on M$ Office or OO. Remember, OO isn't designed to beat wordpad, it's designed to go head to head with Word. As much as I don't like M$, they have a strong incumbant.
Regarding the learning curve, I'd ask the question: "How long have you used MS Office?" Most people who argue the learning curve are trying to use OO in the same way they have used M$ Office for *years*. I hardly see that as a fair evaluation. Try working with the manuals, asking questions in newsgroups, etc. In my experience, the only thing that required "learning curves" was understanding OO's implementation of page/chartacter styles. The rest was a breeze.
Why should you bother? Because innovation requires change. Because competition is good for everyone in the marketplace, and competition breeds innovation.
You also mention that M$ compatibility is lacking in KO... Keep in mind how significant that issue really is. In order to for an office program to be a viable option in the business world it needs to interoperate. Period. As much as I hate to say it, the office arena is still dominated my M$. I receive M$ files from customers all the time, and never have to call them back asking them to change the format. It's seamless.
I'm *not* making any statements here about the quality of KO - I'm sure it's excellent. My point is that in the scheme of things what matters is the ability to communicate outside of your workstation / house / etc. In the real world, M$ is the spoken language to this day.
I'm thankful that Sun paid good money for it, and thankful that Sun has contributed it to Open Source. This is the kind of competition that the industry needs to get prices competitive again. Sun invested a lot of cash to make this happen, and that kind of play shouldn't be taken for granted.