[Gllug] EU patents

[Jason Clifford]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Christopher Hunter wrote:

> "Will I be able to use my "Sage" accounts package on this Linux?  Why not?  I 
> spent a huge amount on that programme.  No - I'll stay with Windoze.  Yes - I 
> know that it's not reliable, especially as we lost four days of work last 
> week after a crash, and all my e-mail address book entries were mailed a 
> virus from here, but we'll stay with it."

The answer to which is to provide a viable alternative that is easy (well 
relatively easy) to migrate to on a Free Software platform.

There is interest in writing such applications however due to their nature 
(ie not things that generally attract a geek to scratch her own itch) they 
require funding to develop. It wont take very much funding however as 
we're not talking about the overheads of a corporate development 
environment.

UKFSN exists to raise that funding for UK projects. I know that this is 
one area that AFFS are looking to work on once the funding is there.

We also need a campaign to inform people that the poor reliability of 
certain platforms is not endemic to the whole IT world and that there are 
alternatives that do deliver on the reliability promise.

It's no use trying to sell a company on better engineering possibilities 
unless they are a software house (and even then their primary interest is 
being able to deliver to their own markets). People simply don't care 
about that when it is offered as an arguement unless it is put into 
specific context - ie easier to avoid vendor lock-in, etc.

Companies need to see that Free Software offers benefits to their business 
interests and that those benefits are so great as to outway the migration 
costs in both the near and long term.

Those benefits do exist:

- far lower tco
	:: less downtime
	:: lower support personnel costs
	:: more efficient use of computing resources

- freedom to form support partnerships with users' preferred suppliers
	:: and the availability of support from multiple sources
	:: including big names like IBM / HP
	:: as well as specialists like RH, SuSE, me, you ;)

- no risk of premature end of life issues for working systems

There are lots of others but I leave it for you lot to fill in the blanks.

Jason Clifford
-- 
UKFSN.ORG		Finance Free Software while you surf the 'net
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