Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Philip Hunt]

On Saturday 03 January 2004  6:03 pm, Chris Croughton wrote:
>
> I'm tempted to move to China, or one of the South American countries
> which is heavily promoting FLOSS for government use <g>.

Or Germany, or South Africa, or Israel, or Thailand, or Japan...

These days, loads of countries are promoting FLOSS to some extent. 
I really feel an avalanche is about to begin and by the end of the year
many countries will have nailed their colours to the mast and
publicly given preference to FLOSS. This doesn't mean they'll get 
rid of all their Microsoft software immediately, but they will during 
the next upgrade cycle.

> > I have come across this too. Its really ignorance and wishful
> > thinking.  Most people are personally averse to change - its hassle so
> > justifying a reason not to change is natural. If such individuals
> > seriously liked the idea of change to OO.o and the corresponding
> > savings they'd do the necessary research to find out the truth about
> > things like this.
>
> But they don't really want to change anything, except to pay less money.
> Very few people are at all interested in the 'freedom' aspects of
> software. 

Indeed. Most people aren't reallyi ntersted in software at all, 
they just want to get on with their lives. People won't care about the
freedom aspects until you show them how it benefits them...

> Out of the four GNU freedoms, the only one they are
> interested in is the first, "the freedom to run the program, for any
> purpose", and they believe they have that with proprietary software
> (once they have a site-wide licence, at least). 

Indeed; with Free Software, you don't need to buy a site wide license.
The *freedom* inherent in Free Software means you are free to use it, 
for any purpose, without having to get anyone's permission (e.g. through
buying a license).

So they need explaining: freedom => you pay less money

> They aren't interested
> (or capable in most cases) of studying the program and adapting it
> themselves, nor in improving it and releasing the improvements to the
> public.  And many companies (and lots of individuals) do believe that
> they have the right to copy it and give it away (as long as they don't
> get caught).

Another advantage of FLOSS is there is no book keeping involved to
make sure you have the right number of licenses in case Microsoft or
their protection racket, the BSA, ask for an audit.

If an organisation has a free-software-only policy (with exceptions 
where there is no free program to do a job) they aren't going to
be caught out by this.

> The only sort of 'free' they are really interested in is "as in beer",
> and large organisations tend to distrust that 'free' things are any good
> ("anything free is worth what you pay for it"), or think that there's a
> catch somewhere

This is a widespread incorrect belief. Perhaps one way to combat
it is to use counter-examples. "Is air no good because you don't
pay for it?" or "Is sex with someone you love not as good as paying
to do it with a prostitute?"

> > There is plenty of this type of evidence about. It doesn't take much
> > to find it. Just type Open Source Software and Industry into Google.
>
> Well, I found the web page of OSAIA, which claims to represent the "open
> source community" but doesn't seem to contain much else apart from a bit
> of bluster (no evidence or facts).  I found an Italian working group for
> Libre Software.  The rest seemed to be opinions of individuals, still no
> examples or facts about it.

Have you seen:

Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!
<http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html>



-- 
Phil Hunt, address@hidden