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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.
In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.
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();
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/en/index.html
:)
download (link at bottom of page) and burn
say it is a promotional effort
Umm how about you use something like apt-get or apt4rpm or any number of the automated software download tools available.
Even that is a myth, though (the calling up MS part). I mean, really, how many people (home users) actually call up and speak to MS at $125/incident. I specify home users, becuase I imagine that most medium and large businesses opt for contract based support. I think that in reality most poeple hit the mailing lists and discussion boards, just like for Linux and other F/OSS products.
I also know that many people think that the Linux mailing lists are full of 733t attitudes and RTFM responses, but I haven't really seen that in the lists to which I subscribe. However, I have observed that such attitudes occur as frequently on MS-related mailing lists as they do on Linux-related lists. In essence, there is parity in the public and freely available support mechanisms. The only real difference is in things like contract support and MSDN, where if you pay a company many thousands of dollars you don't them to reply with "RTFM."
I think that if you explain to people that it is conceptually the same thing (i.e., from the level what an OS and what it is supposed to do) then it is not real difficult to get them to switch, unless they have an overriding reason like a work-related product that only runs on Windows.
In fact, you are better off with Free Software in this context. If an OSS developer gives you the brush-off when you ask for a bug fix, you still have the option of fixing the bug yourself ... or employing someone to do it for you. Besides, if the problem is hurting lots of other people, there is a good chance that some other user will be motivated to fix it.
By contrast, if you are using a closed source product, and the vendor won't fix the problem, you are stuck.
"It Works and Costs Less"
"Low cost generic" seems to get people's attention. They think about generic drugs and generic foods and they instantly understand.
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
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>
Apples new IDE xCode thankfuly will finally have this feature.
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.
WTF? if you are going to cut and paste a karma whore, at least do it from another article's thread. And spend the time reinserting the indents-- if you are going to plagiarize, do some work at least and call it "value added".
(#6602870)
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
If you want to show your mechanic customers even more value... show him how a single Cheap main computer and 5 surplus NCD explora terminals can cut his hardware bill by 90% all only possible under linux while the same thing is 500% more expensive under windows. (windows terminal services... How can we charge you more today?)
I set up a resturant this way. Total bil with hardware and software was $2900.00 Expensive because he decided to use flat panel touchscreen LCD's at the worker stations. Now when any software get's updated, all stations are magically updated. and he still get's worried because he hasn't had to call me for any trouble for 8 months now (he used to use a windows solution.. they called the vendor for the windows setup almost monthly for dll errors, strange crashes, and needing to reboot stations almost weekly because the printers would quit.)
It's great, he's tickled that he has a spare NCD explora to replace a station if it breaks that doesnt need anything bot to be plugged in and turned on, nor do the stations EVER need to be upgraded.
Only drawback of NCD terminals, they are a tad slower on screen drawing if you use 1024X768 resolutions. but that's about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.