http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/save/SaveAwardHomePage/

Unfortunately, one has to be a U.S. Federal Employee or contractor to participate in the Save Award.

I am pleased to see that people have taken the trouble to comment and also the general positive tone.

While I agree with the points made, I think we are in danger of talking to ourselves. If any of us were to go into the high street and ask randomly about computers, we would discover a different picture.

The popular face of ICT is proprietary software and no sense of personal control. In their world computers “wear out” and need replacing. This is the mountain we need to climb.

I am in the process of turning the talking into walking, currently scratching my head over the business model and market positioning.

Perhaps I’ll get the opportunity to report progress here

Gerry

Software is a linguistic choice, French is only “better” than English to a French man.

You don’t need to market or promote open software at all, it is good enough to simply integrate with existing systems.

The system integrator is the translator in the lingustic model of open software adoption.

There is no need to talk about open software integration, just do it.

You make plenty of money off the non open work to pay for the open work.

You can see this as a Robin Hood role, which competes well with the propitiatory only model of the robbing hood.

How often do you pay for the monumental discovery that a fraction of crude oil, when placed in a restricted space and ignited can make you move forwards? Never. It is knowledge that we use for free. It is common property. We no longer even think about it. Does that make it worthless, or as per your theory, mean that don’t use cars? Patently not.

FOSS is the completion of the circle. In the beginning the software was just something that the engineers did to make the bit you paid for work. Then as it got more complicated people started making you pay for it separately to make more money, except that we kind of got hooked on this and have yet to move on.

We have now *done* the operating system and basic productivity apps, all bar the shouting. I can already hear the wails of protest from those who are still hard at work perfecting these things and I hope they’ll bear with me for a moment. All the work on these things is now pretty much incremental and perfecting. There is nothing earth shaking going on in this arena any more. We need to focus our concentration and resources on the vast swathes of functionality that have not been done. What we are doing now is piling more and more money into an area of the map that we have paid for 100 times already. Why? Because there is a company who has engineered themselves into a position where they can do that at will. They have found a hook, driven it in to the hilt and are now defending it at all costs, with tactics that have even been found to be criminal several times now.

However, all is not lost. Their vicious tactics and complete intransigence is going to backfire. This is not wishful thinking, just a close observance of history.

There has been an equal and opposite force in operation for the last 15 or so years. The energy this company put into their offensive has been opposed and turned to the production of an entirely separate and unassailable stack of software that can do everything that their own software can do, but in a manner that means they cannot own it. In fact nobody can, because everybody does; it is common property, like the common land of old England. We know we need it, so instead of allowing the monopolistic interests of the local baron to control it, to the detriment of all, it is owned in common by the people that use it. An immensely powerful idea.

I have watched this stuff hurtling through space for the last 10 years plus following it’s trajectory forwards and waiting for the inevitable impact. We are now at the niggle-nit-picky stage where the menus on “The Gimp” aren’t quite as something or other as the menus on “Photoshop” and Open Office looks like a less recent version of another Office Suite. Gone are the days of “It doesn’t work on my laptop” and “It is virtually impossible to install”. I am now watching it stretch the elastic holding it back to an alarming extent. Once it has broken through into the public imagination, as it did in the machine room years ago, people will remember the nightmare days of “Reinstalling Windows” with a kind of morbid wry smile.

“Why on earth did we keep paying for that stuff?”

You tell me friends. You tell me.

That’s what marketing *is*

The other problem is that if people pay for something then they value it. If they get something for free then it is perceived as cheap, no-good or (quite literally) worthless.

We still have not got past the “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer” mentality. Perversely enough, if we charge more for free software, more people are likely to want and use it.

Cheers!

But the experience of buying a computer with Linux is still quite painful.

But I am working on it.

Rockin regards,

Marco