On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 15:42:04 PM +0300, Lars Noodén
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> M. Fioretti wrote:
>
> > Forgetting this fact of life is an all too common mistakes of
> > several FOSS advocates, who fail to reach people because they seem
> > always to give for granted that everybody _loves_ software hacking
> > and flexibility.
>
> No. I can't stand it.
Er... sorry, what is exactly that you cannot stand?
> One can make a strong case that one of the main reasons Novell
> Netware lost marketshare to MS in the late 90's was that Netware
> more or less ran by itself and needed little or no attention. Often
> leaving no ongoing technical crises to keep staff on.
I'm not sure how this is relevant to the initial point I made. I mean,
was Netware to be used by normal employees like MS or Open Office?
Does Netware, or anything of the kind, create a lock through
proprietary file formats even remotely comparable to what MS Office
does?
> Based on my observations in institutions and businesses that *do
> not* use software as anything much more than a glorified typewriter
> or calculator MS is used not because it increases productivity, but
> rather the opposite.
Lars, come on. MS is used simply because it's there and because (until
it will be forced to manage opendocument) it has already locked
billions of documents in proprietary file formats.
> using FOSS or even a hybrid like OS X allows the machines to be
> installed and forgotten, thus permitting everyone to get back to
> work.
No, sorry, but this is the crucial point. This is not true. Using FOSS
on the desktop in any *already existing* large organization (I don't
know much about OS X) means (on the desktop, backends are indeed a
different issues):
1) _stop_ operations to migrate and maybe train employees. This alone
can be a showstopper, even if it happens one department at a
time. It officially was one in a big company where I worked
2) scream for and waste time for several months, every time you need a
old .doc file and OO.o cannot display it properly.
sure, both problems are, at least partially, dumb ones and none of
them is really impossible to solve, but they do exist in the eyes and
actual experience of many people: presenting it as an "install and
forget" thing can be really counterproductive, at least if you speak
of desktops and office work, as I believe you are doing speaking on
this list. Again, on backend servers is an entirely different issue.
Ciao,
Marco
--
The one book on software and digital technologies that no parent
can ignore http://digifreedom.net/node/84
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