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On Sunday 08 January 2006 12:39 pm, Henry Bremridge wrote: > > Thats good. I was going to say, the school could charge say 50p to the > > students to cover the distribution costs :-) although from what I > > remember of school kids, they don't like paying for anything unless they > > really need it. > > People only value things when they have to pay (time, money) for them or can understand the benefits. This generally involves someone having the benefit removed from them by some third party beyond their direct control. Examples are specific to individuals and that's where the generalised theme in this thread needs to become a one-to-one conversation. We all have our reasons for moving to free software - we would not have moved if we had not understood the benefits of such a change. Therefore, we each valued free software BEFORE we had invested any time or money because the move itself required an investment of time and possibly money that we had to justify in advance. In many cases, the understanding of the benefits arose from conversations with those who had already seen the value. In others, it came by reading such conversations on publicly archived mailing lists. Freedom begets freedom, the more open we are about why we do what we do, the more people become interested. This is the flaw in promoting open source as a business model compared to free software as a philosophy that has a business benefit. By narrowing the arguments to only commercial / financial benefits, you lose the ability to argue in favour of the small investment (time or money) that may be required in the change. Open source proponents - especially in business environments - are too keen to stress the immediate financial benefits. This leaves the philosophical benefits untouched and when the business benefits come into question (from competition or simply retraining costs), the decision to move to free software has lost it's foundation. It becomes only a decision to use one development model compared to another. This is currently how Microsoft see free software - they've accepted the open source development model but failed to grasp the dynamic of the community that makes the model work: that people will only contribute if they feel valued and can share that value with others. We must talk about more than just the commercial value / financial benefits of our favourite OS. Free software is far more than "just another development model" - it's also far more than just an OS - free software is about the future, it's about an ideal and a philosophy that sharing is an inherently GOOD thing to do. Sharing is an end in and of itself - it does not need to be validated or artificially engineered, it DOES need to be reciprocal and this is the only reason for the "restrictions" in the GNU GPL. Sharing is it's own reward. This needs to be our message, loud and clear. Sharing is the right thing to do and is inherently beneficial for everyone. Sharing requires freedom, sharing reinforces freedom and sharing benefits freedom. The problem is that in commercial / business environments sharing can be frequently seen as anti-capitalist, socialist or simply impossible. Those are the barriers we need to break down - philosophical and political, not financial. The business case for free software is grounded in sharing. Let's talk more about freedom and sharing - let's talk about what makes our community work. People willing to share their time and effort for little or no monetary reward, in order to help others, to respect the people who shared their time and effort before them and to build sharing and freedom into the future for the benefit of all. I'd sum up the entire GNU message in one line: You deserve free software and everyone deserves the right to share it with you, now and for the future. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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