Re: [Fsfe-uk] Why FS is a Good Thing

[Ramin Nakisa]

On Wednesday 13 March 2002 19:50, you wrote:
> Can we distill these down to 4-5 bullet points, targeted at specific
> areas (governemnt, education, business, individuals, etc).  "Top 5
> reasons to use free software in education", "... in business", etc.

It would be nice if we could back some of these up with numbers.  I know that 
in business particularly the cost savings are important, so some real numbers 
would be nice from people who have experience of such things.

There are 3000 employees where I work, and everyone has a PC.  So if you 
multiply that by the annual XP license fee... which I don't know... Then we 
have a huge floor full of servers...  Then there are all the commercial 
packages we use, such as Lotus Notes, Sybase etc.  I think we should be able 
to come up with some remarkable and totally convincing numbers.

I think we could make a good case for govt. paying companies to write Free 
Software.  In effect they'd just be paying the daily rate of programmers 
rather than paying for the software itself.  And it would be nice if the 
uber-nerd in charge of the project wasn't part of the business, so they would 
ensure that the code was well designed and commented.  Obfuscated GPL code is 
as good as proprietary.

Ramin.