An opening for open source?

[Ed Lawson]

Travis Roy wrote:

>I'm just pointing out things that are going
>to be said and possibly brought up. He should have answers for all of
>these responses. I'm getting him prepaired for what to expect. The
>subscription thing would be a killer, but as far as retraining and
>migration he needs to have answers to their questions and concerns. Even
>if they replace staff with new unix people they'll need to keep the old MS
>people around for the migration process, 
>
I think it is important to keep in mind that open source does not mean a 
Linux solution.  There are many open source projects for the Windows 
platform.  When I give a talk to educators, I often give them a CD of 
Windows only open source software.  I refer to it as my disruptive 
technology disk and say something casual like it contains software worth 
thousands of dollars and they are free to use it and copy it as much as 
they like.  For example I include Mozilla, OpenOffice, apache, MySQL, 
PHP, several PHP apps for long distance classrooms, portals, Wikis, 
etc., Perl, Python, Ruby, and various XML tools. If they used the tools 
I give them, they could do most anything they needed and could create 
some very innovative stuff for the school.  Of course you can only 
expect some to try Mozilla and OpenOffice, but some might say...lets try 
out a webserver using Apache, etc....then you can say...well, if you use 
Linux we can do this on the computers you consider junk...at that point 
the bells should start to go off.

Its a tough sell in any event.  I think showing  what can be done with 
Open Source on Windows is a good way to introduce the concept and 
possibilities.  Putting together a demo of terminal server or a Linux 
Samba/Apache server would start to get their attention.  Schools often 
have more hardware than you might expect, but it is not used well or 
ignored becase it is not up to snuf  for running the latest Windows, 
multimedia software.

Making them think they have to train staff on Unix, etc.  will get you a 
glassy eyeed stare everytime.

Ed Lawson