[Gllug] Open Source lobbying meeting - UKUUG London Thurs 19th

[Aaron Trevena]

On 12/10/06, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
> There are several parts to the problem:
>
> 1) FL?OSS programmers tend to be individuals who don't work well in large groups.
>    Herding cats is a phrase that springs to mind.

I think you're wasting your time even thinking about that, it's a myth
- some programmers don't work well in teams and you'll find them in
any software project regarless of whether it's open source or not.

> 2) FL?OSS people tend to distrust/dislike marketing people, yet is it marketing
>    that is needed to get our stuff out there.

Again - it's more a general engineers thing. The more lefty anarchist
types might have a dislike of marketing, but if you understand that
marketing really boils down to getting you r point accross there isn't
much to dislike beyond how some people choose to do that (or of course
their point itself)

> 3) FL?OSS projects don't generate large sums of money so people cannot be employed to
>    ensure that it is widely used: ie we don't employ the marketing people and the
>    admin/secretarial/... types who fill in EU grant application forms, etc.

Again - that varies from project to project, USING the F/LOSS can
generate more than selling it, so it DOES generate a lot of revenue,
just that many projects don't get any revenue.

Regional Development Agencies and DTI, etc are supposed to provide
help with this to any small business, and there is no reason for them
not to help any given open source project. Most businesses are small
and find it very hard to apply for funding - being open source makes
little difference.

> 4) FL?OSS is great for infrastructure and has some good end user visible applications
>    (eg: openofice; firefox) but has big holes (eg: a mapi connector that would allow
>    a FL?OSS groupware server talk to unmodified MS Outlook clients; a decent personal
>    finance package [gnucash has some way to go]). These 'hard' items need funding,
>    where do we get it from ?

I think those gaps are mostly because the market and need for those
area is too small or already addressed in a 'good enough' way.

The big issue that needs looking at is why government and public
funded organisations aren't using open source for shoe-ins like
infrastructure, integration, etc and why it insists on throwing tons
of money at hugely expensive projects with the big 5 like accenture,
rather than smaller scale projects using open source technology,
smaller companys (open source oriented or not) and leveraging inhouse
skills to share open source software between themselves.

When you think how much the NHS and other national infrastructure
spend on IT and then compare it to internal IT knowledge, skills and
development you can see why there is a big problem. using open source
to build and share what is needed would save a lot of money, make the
organisations more self-sufficient and less reliant on big
consultancies and allow smaller organisations to get involved.

cheers,

A.

Cheers,

A.

-- 
http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk
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