Re: [Fsfe-uk] Proof of how scared senseless higher ed is of MS

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2003-07-26 at 10:12, Paul wrote:
> > > [Snip professional problems encountered after responding to a troll.]

I think there is a lesson in here somewhere ;)

To be fair to PFJ, IKG was ruining ucol for a lot of people - I remember
reading it at the time, and we also had a discussion about him here. To
quote a great philosopher, "If the seagulls are following the trawler,
it's because they think there will be fish" (or something). QED - don't
feed the troll ;)

> > I expect your bigotry is putting the people you're trying to persuade
> > off `free software'.  And please stop using `Microsod' or any other
> > childish replacement and it slows down this reader, and many others.
> 
> Not quite following you there. I would not equate advocasy with bigotry
> (though some may). My argument is (and always has been) to use the best
> tool for the job.

I think Ralph is just saying that the best form of advocacy is that
which doesn't denigrate the competition. In fact, often the best tactic
is to almost weaken your argument selectively wrt who you are talking
to: if you are talking to a purchasing manager, telling them what bad
value for money they are getting is not a good idea. The correct
argument to use is who they could _improve_ their value for money ;)
It's a spin thing, I guess, but basically amounts to being positive, not
negative - people tend to be defensive about the spending that they have
made, for example.

> Well, as someone who does see both sides of the coin, I can honestly say
> it gets more and more depressing day by day. Last year, we spent
> somewhere approaching 5000 UKP on non-MS software licences for 2
> packages (Adobe Premier and Quark Express 5).

To be honest, packages like this don't really scare me hugely. Premiere
has a lot of things going for it, but it's not a key package for Adobe
(which is why they dropped it on Mac) since there are bigger gorillas in
that market (Avid, for example) in areas Free Software is unlikely to
reach any time soon (unless developers start designing their own video
processing ASICs ;). Ditto Quark to an extent, although it's quite
clearly a key package for the makers of the product, but again it's
quite a specialist thing.

I'm really more concerned with the Microsoft area of the market. The
Fords and Vauxhalls rather than the Beemers of this world. I think it's
ready very possible to replace large amounts of desktop infrastructure
with Free Software, including the operating system. One of the main
problems we face at the moment is not that the software isn't capable,
but that there isn't established experience rolling this software out,
there isn't established best practice, there isn't established support
and people don't feel comfortable with it. There is a lot of scope here
to make big, positive changes, and I would be quite happy to leave the
battle over niche proprietary software for another day: the key one is
clearly the mass market.

Cheers,

Alex.

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