Promoting FOSS to People Who Don't Care 432
MarcoF brings us his take on how to cultivate interest in open-source software to casual users who aren't interested in or necessarily aware of its existence. Many people simply have trouble leaving their comfort zone of older proprietary software; what's the best way to get them to look at an open-source alternative?
"Since most people would rather die than write or study software source code, it is actually counterproductive to promote software 'because you can modify it yourself and be part of its community'. Look for really practical advantages which can be enjoyed every day by the person you want to convince. Start from the actual deep passions, beliefs, interests and practical needs of the people in front of you and go backwards from there, delaying the apparition of terms like 'source code', 'the four software freedoms', GPL, Gnu, Linux, etc."
Re:Easy, no Licenses/activation key (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Value of Time to promote FOSS (Score:3, Informative)
sigh I hate to nit-pick these things, but "goodwill" in an accounting context means something completely different. Specifically, when one company acquires another, they pay an amount of cash, often (usually) well above the value of the other company's assets. To balance this difference, the purchasing company is said to have acquired a fictitious asset called "goodwill" that accounts for the difference in value between the company's assets and the paid value of the acquired company. So if you pay $10,000,000 for a company that has $2,000,000 in assets, you've acquired (in accounting terms) $2,000,000 in assets and $8,000,000 in goodwill.
Re: Here, try this DVD (Score:1, Informative)
http://theopendisc.com/ [theopendisc.com] (replaced The OpenCD)
http://softwarefor.org/ [softwarefor.org] (Software for Starving Students)