Promoting FOSS to People Who Don't Care

MarcoF brings us his take on how to cultivate interest in open-source software to casual users who aren't interested in or necessarily aware of its existence. Many people simply have trouble leaving their comfort zone of older proprietary software; what's the best way to get them to look at an open-source alternative? "Since most people would rather die than write or study software source code, it is actually counterproductive to promote software 'because you can modify it yourself and be part of its community'. Look for really practical advantages which can be enjoyed every day by the person you want to convince. Start from the actual deep passions, beliefs, interests and practical needs of the people in front of you and go backwards from there, delaying the apparition of terms like 'source code', 'the four software freedoms', GPL, Gnu, Linux, etc."

Comments

Re:Easy, no Licenses/activation key

[CastrTroy]

One way to help is refuse to install unlicensed software on people's computers. Somebody says, I want a copy of photoshop. Say, go buy Photoshop Elements for $100, or here's a copy of GIMP for free. It doesn't have all the same features, and is kind of different. Most people will choose the free software over paying for something. I actually got my wife to use GIMP in this way. Actually we downloaded a trial of photoshop, and she found that she actually liked GIMP more. Give open source software a fair trial, and then compare it to the commercial alternative. Most people would rather have the free one than pay for MS Office, Photoshop, or most of the other stuff that people usually only have because they pirate it.

Re: Value of Time to promote FOSS

[The One and Only]

In Business Terms: The accounting term is called "goodwill". That's what the single user-demos are building.

sigh I hate to nit-pick these things, but "goodwill" in an accounting context means something completely different. Specifically, when one company acquires another, they pay an amount of cash, often (usually) well above the value of the other company's assets. To balance this difference, the purchasing company is said to have acquired a fictitious asset called "goodwill" that accounts for the difference in value between the company's assets and the paid value of the acquired company. So if you pay $10,000,000 for a company that has $2,000,000 in assets, you've acquired (in accounting terms) $2,000,000 in assets and $8,000,000 in goodwill.