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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?
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.
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.
I tried that once (in the UK). Microsoft reps actually complained to the student's union, and, by some twisted logic (the university was already paying for microsoft software, I was undermining the university's investment), got me shut down. I tried to explain that the value MS quotes for their software is essentially pulled directly out of their ass, but it didn't wash - too many people would have been left looking stupid if they had to admit they had signed a stupid deal with MS.
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.
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 $400 for office for school when its bundled with some Dells (of course it ends up costing the same thing, but if these were smart and informed customers, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place). Plus the stores wouldn't care, cause the profit margins are nonexistent for software.
barzelay.net
That's actually what I'm trying to get a local shop to do. Sell small form-factor PC's that are targeted to a specialized purpose. Usually server related. Sell some service with that, and that'll carry a small shop through these tough times. Baby steps, baby steps, I don't think they're quite ready for the client-side of things, even though there are a few there who dabble with Linux. There's money there for those who don't leave any stone unturned.
Yeh, a few weeks ago, I sat down at a friends new computer, and noticed they had OOo (on win), installed. When I said "oh wow, thats cool...", they just looked at me strange.
They hadn't even realised it wasn't M$ Office. They said they had noticed it was different "but so is eveything else on my new computer".
They brought this particular setup because "it was the cheapest, from a reliable store".
My Paintball Pics
"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 ##
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. ;)
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.
Getting people to use Linux is as simple as this: Sell an ultra cheap computer through the gov't preloaded with Linux (example: Thailand). Get a million new machines on the street this way and you'll get acceptance.
On a more serious note, The interest generated in Linux in every newspaper and magazine here is enormous.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
Personally, I really just DIDN'T CARE about the mythical Joe User. Microsoft or apple or sony are welcome to him. I only began to make Linux more Joe-User's-Desktop friendly AFTER Microsoft decided they wanted us dead because we were destroying the market for their server-side "unix-killer" (ha!) NT. If MS had stuck to idiot-box client desktops and not attacked us, I wouldn't now be working on KDE.
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!Hell, a lot of people think that their monitor is the computer, and the box is the CPU. The internet? Oh, you mean AOL!
The only way to get people to use open source is to sell it with the computer.
I'm sorry but what planet are you on?
No software comes with any warrenty either expresssed or implied.
That's a pretty basic foundation for software in general, otherwise MS would be liable for damages caused by their shittying programming. As well as the geek who wrote the kernel patch that borked the file system.
There's a million and one examples of closed source
companies ignoring user complaints about bugs to outright denial that there is anything even wrong.
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."
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"
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.
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.
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 *&#$9. We are in works to see about putting a "This terminal is powered by Linux" ad button. We currently have one box in the field we are test marketing. And when users are asked if they knew they were using Linux, they mostly say no. Then when asked what they thought, its "Well I could check my email, its what agian?" If photoshop (Sorry GIMP doesn't cut it), Dreamweaver, and maybe a couple other widely used apps made it to Linux (like Maya has for 3D artists), then people might be willing to make the jump. Ask most Mac users if they know that FreeBSD is under the hood, and they will say "Free what? It runs iMovie, and this iTunes is cool. Word and Powerpoint work better than on Windows." Now as a server OS, I still deploy FreeBSD before Linux for most uses. I guess its a personal thing, but FreeBSD was designed as a Server Platform. While Linux still has that Desktop/Server dual personality issue to work out.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I disagree that the time has past for the Linux Desktop - People will always consider an alternative. Rather, the issue is twofold: Foremost - when was the last time you saw a Linux advertisement that was in the local flyers from BestBuy/etc? Word of mouth is the best advertising, but the geek market tends to only talk to itself which renders word of mouth almost useless for the market intended to reach. Secondly - a major of the OS apps out there are betas compared to what one sees on Windows. Poor installers (much less uninstallation), meagre documentation, dependency issues... All stop Joe Average when confronted with these realities. To ever make a competitive desktop, these need to be addressed. Until that time, Linux will continue to be the elitist OS of choice.
On the agreement side with the article, yes, Open Office will sure brings users to open source idea and move users farther from M$.
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.
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.
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!
You must enjoy going to work everyday. Me personally, I prefer to show people that don't know much about Linux or Open Source what the stuff can/can't do, instead of carrying myself around the office like some l337 jerk.
BOOM go my mod rights...
A friend of mine on MSN Messenger has been using Windows Millennium for ages, with MSN/IE/Hotmail.
I told him about ICQ, and all its features. He downloaded it. He now uses it exclusively.
I told him about Mozilla, and the popup blocker facility and all of the features over IE. He downloaded it. He can't believe he missed it for all those years.
I got him to download VNC and let him have a piss about on my KDE desktop. He loved it.
He got Knoppix. The next PC he gets, he wants to get Linux w/ KDE.
You cannot be told what Linux is, and how good it is. You have to see it for yourself. Let people have a go for themselves. Show them around. Give them a Knoppix disc. Hands on experience is good experience.
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