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Open Source Advocacy The Right Way
[vmlinuz] writes "With a rapid succession of people moving towards Open Source, advocacy and evangelism is increasingly important in helping organizations to move over. The O'Reilly Network has begun publishing a series of articles about Open Source by Jono Bacon that teaches how to approach advocacy sensibly and more productively." From the article: "Although Aristotle developed his message many, many years ago, the concept of optimizing how we talk to people has developed further throughout history. From Aristotle to Heraclitus to Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Keller to George Bernard Shaw, many people have advocated new thinking in times of rabid opposition."
It means little unless you know it's spoken from the perspective of a 15th century penguin salesman extolling the virtues of a soft sell vs. a hard sell. The latter is most necessary with an inferior product; if the quality of the merchandise can speak for itself, don't get in its way.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
We are the Church Of :wq!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
My aunts husband asked me a few days ago if I wouldn't mine showing him Linux and telling him a bit about it when he next comes round. I'm a little worried that I'll yap on endlessly about open source and Linux only being a kernel and the GPL and bore him to death before he even gets a chance to see how great various distos are.
What I really need is a good, SHORT, list of information about linux and open source software that I can print out and give to him to read at his leasure so I can get on with showing him some cool stuff on the PC.
Anyone know of anything like that?
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
"From Aristotle to Heraclitus" Heraclitus was PRE-Socratic, i.e. BEFORE Aristotle's time... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus And as far as evangelism goes, it'd prolly be better to lean more towards Demosthenes an orator. Aristotle was not consumed with the need to convince his audience that he was speaking for .
I'm a longtime advocate of free (as in speech) software, but comparing the leaders of the open-source movement to the sages of old, and comparing their struggles to those of Helen Keller and other heroes of the past, is downright egotistical.
;) ) and ESA members will switch to an open-source model, and-- like it or not-- they are what crank out the vast majority of software that the vast majority of end-users (and corporate "IT" people, as contrasted with "geeks" like us) use.
Yes, open-source/free software does face "rabid opposition"; however, it likely always will. As much as I love free software, do you ever forsee a time where it will become the "standard"? Can you imagine Microsoft, or Adobe, or EA Games, making most or all of their software open-source (under any license?)
I can't either.
It's not so much that free/open-source software faces a "time" of rabid opposition. It will always face rabid opposition. It is virtually inconceivable that the BSA (not the boy scouts
Don't like that? Crank out games as nice as the commercial vendors can. Release them under the GPL. Make OpenOffice as good as MS Office. Make a GNU/Linux system as easy to use as Windows, and 99% compatible with 99% of existing Windows software, or come up with GPLed equivalents for 99% of existing Windows software. Until that happens, free/open-source software will perpetually face "rabid opposition", because those who oppose it (BSA/ESA member companies) will always be the most powerful force driving software development and use.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Best open source advocacy is the Microsoft's study about TCO. They base their claim on the postulate that a linux expert has higher salary then a MSWin expert. To a MSWin expert, this is very appealing argument to start to learn linux.
' and easier to maintain code than today's so called high level languages.'
.NET
Java can be faster if you use a profiling JVM, (well unless you profile your C code and get gentoo to re-emerge with using the profile every other week)
this should also apply to
Java is also much easier to maintain that C, because it's almost exactly the same as C with enough bits missing to let it run in a Virtual Machine and some extra rules inplace.
Of couse bad C is probably easier to maintain that bad Java and Bad C++.
In which case you would have to start argueing.
Use OSS because all software is bad, it's just that our version of bad is easier to maintain....
your using the 'anti' claus, your not saying were better because were the best your saying.
We use C isn't better because they try to sell a new compiler (who SUN and GCC?).
Not we use C it's better because it's simpler and more compact that many of todays languages that have lots of bolted on features that havent matured yet.
Remember, positive energy activates constant elevation. Be positive about OSS not negative about everything else.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Considering the number of Linux zealots that I've had the misfortune of meeting, I think not; your comment would tend to prove my point.
And by the way, I'm a Linux user, and have been for some time. I advocate Linux usage - just not rabidly.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
What's Ruby written in?
And isn't that what is wrong with the world today. People need to worry about themselves and not about what other people are doing. (unless, of course, those other people are hurting other people)
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
> programming time is finite where as
> cpu time is not
True. But it's seldom the bottleneck.
> Although you may save 400 Development hours
> you can lose millions of hours of runtime
> productivity.
Or you may save millions of hours by being able to quickly and accurately implement features to help the users of your produce get work done.
The Army reading list
I've yet to see a Windows installation program that says "I see you have Linux in this partition. Would you like me to install elsewhere on this disk and give you an option menu at boot up?"
My windows2000 upgrade from win98 detected the Linux partition and added a bootloader with the choice between the two.