On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 12:58:55PM +0100, Steve Fosdick wrote:
What we must do is to convince people that this is the situation rather than it being one of paying more for a better product. To do this, stories of other similar organisations that have successfully switched to a free OS and/or a free desktop suite will be easier to understand that any technical argument.
My favourite atm is not to try and convince windows users with little computer knowledge to try things like Linux but get them onto things like GnuWin http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html lots of people turn off when they hear about "operating systems" but many tend to stay alert when you say "free software" (unfortunatly for the wrong reasons) but all the same I think GnuWin is a good start for many people as there is so much on just 1 CD and many people will find something of use.
The other thing I have noticed is how few people have heard of OpenOffice compared to how many have heard of Linux, that is another area that needs lots of evangalising is to get people running openoffice on windows and when their licenses or support for the OS run out (NT 4.0 has around a year left, as does win 98 I think) they have already tried free software and we could perhaps persuade a migration to Linux (of course there is a benefit here that they can use their old hardware while running free software vs using non-free software that will probably require a new computer)
Adam