In the Aboriginal Canadian IT Efforts thread, Ken Burch wrote: "under CLUE's mandate that we are obligated to contact the relevant people and provide them with Linux advocacy material and links. They need to know that we are people who want them to succeed. If they don't hear the gospel, they won't respond to it. This is not debatable: we need to do it. If we are not prepared to do it, than we should be."
This raises a good question: is CLUE, as a National organization prepared to advocate the benefits of Linux and Open Source solutions? NO, I don't think we are. To solve this, I'd like to begin by compiling a 'library' of sorts of information and documents advocating Linux and Open Source Solutions. Please send me links to documents that you find inspiring, or that would be useful in this effort. I'll start, with: Open Source Initiatives Advocacy Page http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/ A Business Case Study of Open Source Software http://www.mitre.org/support/papers/tech_papers_01/kenwood_software/kenwood_ software.pdf Free Software/Open Source: Information Society Opportunities for Europe http://eu.conecta.it/paper/paper.html Why Free Software's TCO Must Be Lower http://www.members.optushome.com.au/brendanscott/papers/freesoftwaretco15070 2.html "This paper argues that the long run total cost of operations (TCO) for a suite of proprietary software must necessarily be greater than that for an equivalent suite of free software, with the TCO benefits maximised in the case of the GPL and GPL-like free software. The total cost of operation of a suite of free software is the price determined by a competitive market for a bundle of goods and services associated with that suite. Because the source code is open and not subject to limitations on development or distribution, the market for services relating to that code will be perfectly competitive. A rational vendor will use a proprietary route for a program only where releasing that program in that way will allow them to increase their profit above that which would be returned to them by the operation of a competitive market. This result should be hardly surprising, given that the express objective of copyright law is to mandate a market failure and permit software creators to extract above market rents as an incentive for the creation of that software. Customers attempting to evaluate a free software v proprietary solution can confine their investigation to an evaluation of the ability of the packages to meet the customer's needs, and may presume that the long run TCO will favor the free software package. Further, because the licensing costs are additional dead weight costs, a customer ought to also prefer a free software solution with functionality shortfalls where those shortfalls can be overcome for less than the licensing cost for the proprietary solution." Thanks Bill
