Does Everex benefit open source market?

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Microsoft marketing has been amazing for them. My cousin (who I hadn't chatted with for years) was over at my house last weekend. After reading her mail on my laptop she started asking about what I do for a living. When I spoke about Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), she said she had heard about this but thought that the command line stuff was too hard for most people. I then asked how she thought the experience was reading her gmail email on my laptop.

Reality: She didn't know that what she was using was FLOSS, and was extremely surprised.


There is also the "second hand smoke" style problem that occurs with Microsoft Office. It doesn't matter to me what operating system you run, but it does matter to me if we can read each others emails and office documents. Non-standard file and communications formats are a major problem, and switching to standards-based alternatives is very important.


With this in mind I believe that getting OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and Firefox onto peoples existing or new computers (Mac or Windows) is far more important than operating systems. I believe that the operating system should be the last thing that people switch, not the first thing.

One tool I use is to always have copies of http://theopencd.org/ with me at all times, which is a sampling of the most important FLOSS for Windows.

Posted by: russell@...   Posted on: 07/20/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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