[Sussex] A Brief Guide to Open-Source

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

Matthew Macdonald-Wallace wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm currently writing a bid for some work that would potentially involve 
> replacing windows with Linux on several machines and networking them 
> together.
> 
> Does anyone know of a good non-technical and succinct description of 
> Free/Open-Source Software and its benefits?  These people are not 
> technical by a long strech, and whilst "It's free" will be a great help, 
> they are bound to ask the question "Well, what's wrong with it then?"... :)

Following on from the above, I came up with the following last night:

==============
Open source software is software that is generally provided free of 
charge and can be adapted as needed as long as the original author is 
given credit.  Although it is licensed software, there are generally no 
license fees attached to it, unlike commercial software.  As it is 
written and developed by a large community, any errors or omissions are 
spotted – and therefore fixed – more quickly than many commercial packages.

Open-Source software provides a way of ensuring full compliance with 
licensing laws at the same time as reducing the total costs of running a 
system.
===============


I'm not a marketing guy (or much of a developer when it comes to that!), 
but I think that the most important part of the F/OSS movement is that 
it is (in the majority) free as in speech and in beer (to use an already 
over-used phrase!).

I refer to it as Open-Source because so many people I speak to are 
immediately suspicious of free software or indeed "free" anything.  When 
I point out that in the vast amount of cases (in fact I struggle to 
think of one where it is not) Open-Source and especially GNU/Linux and 
it's ilk is more stable, more secure and quite often faster than 
commercial software - and I'm not just talking about operating systems 
here - the only thing that has stuck in their head is that it does not 
cost anything to purchase and therefore there must be something wrong 
with it.

It's usually at that point I either give up, or produce my laptop and 
start showing them that linux can act just like windows, and yet it's 
free.  That's when they usually bite.

Anyways,  please let me know what you think of the first draft of my 
statement on FOSS,
Cheers,

Matt