[luau] NEWS: Linux Adovacy: The Next Generation

[Warren Togami]

Roblimo of Newsforge makes several interesting points in how he explains to
business people about the Linux platform.

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/16/189235&mode=thread&tid=23

... My speech was titled Building Online Profits with Free Software. It drew
more than 100 people, only a handful of whom were Linux users.
I enjoy this kind of advocacy. It's more satisfying than speaking to a room
full of the converted, and does more good in the long run. The guy in the
third row aisle seat who ran the golf magazine and golf Web site would never
have come to hear a presentation about Linux per se, but when you talk about
making his site more profitable he's all ears, asks lots of questions, and
later goes to the booth in a back corner of the exhibit hall run by the
local Linux User Group.

The difference between this presentation and past ones I've done is that I
didn't talk about the wonders of Linux very much. I talked about making
attractive Web sites at minimal cost, and mentioned Linux, Apache and some
other software as tools. For this audience, composed primarily of local
non-computer business owners and managers, software is not a primary
concern. To them software is like a telephone system or a pickup truck: a
tool. If they find a new software tool that'll do what needs to be done
better, faster or cheaper than the one they're already using, they'll switch
brands as fast as they'll buy a Ford pickup instead of a Chevy (or vice
versa).

I did not detect any particular Microsoft loyalty. Rather, I sensed
acceptance that Microsoft was something one was stuck with; that it was all
there was. At the end of my presentation, when I mentioned the slide show
they had all seen was produced with StarOffice, not PowerPoint, and that my
laptop was running Linux, not Windows, at least 20 people gathered around
the podium to ask more questions about Linux on the desktop. Several in this
small group had read about StarOffice, but none of them had ever seen it in
action before. They were impressed when I showed off the programs' features,
and with the simple, clean look of my basic KDE desktop (the default in
Mandrake 8.2), and how I had loaded buttons for almost all my everyday
software into the panel at the bottom of the screen so I could call up any
of these programs with a single click, even if the rest of my desktop was
covered with open windows. (The fact that I could keep dozens of windows
open at one time without anything crashing seemed to impress some of them,
too.)

...

He goes on to explain how best to explain Linux to business people.  Good
read.

Read the full article at:
http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/16/189235&mode=thread&tid=23