[NTLUG:Discuss] Open Source

[Greg Edwards]

> Dennis Rice wrote:

> 
> Education is the fundamental focus of promoting the use of Open
Source,
> be it an application or an operating system.  But who are we
attempting
> to educate?  Is it the president of the company, the users, or the IT
> staff that maintains the network?  Is it other geeks or the medical
> doctor who does not care what goes on under the hood of his car or the
> inside of a PC?
> 


> 
> Dennis
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> "Greg Edwards" wrote:
> 
> ...
> I'll go back to my root belief that education is the key to the whole
> thing.  There is a widely held perception that if it's cheap then you
> get what you pay for.
> 
> ...
> 

My goal is to educate as many people as possible.  Power is wielded by
either numbers or wealth.  M$ has the wealth, so we need the numbers.
Today very few people in the office talk about using OpenOffice.
Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird are the only OSS products that get any
real notice.  If the boss hears 10 people talking about OpenOffice being
able to do everything that MS Office can do for $300 less and doesn't
crash on top of it, they'll notice.  If only 1 person mentions it just
once, nobody notices.

I agree fully about the installer issue.  I think that most of the
distributors (RH, Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc) have stepped up to the plate
and provided the GUIs that users will accept.  Now it's up to developers
to accept them.  Are we going to get a single solution for packaging
software?  I wouldn't hold my breath on that.  But, as long as we have
the tools we'll get an automated method figured out.  Solving problems
is what we do after all ;)

--
Greg Edwards