R. Scott Belford wrote: <snip> > Canonical left me hanging on meetings with the CIO of The University <snip>
I was organizing an Open Source Seminar (see www.ictopcuracao.com) and tried to get at least one 'suit' from one of the vendors. Novell - no reply to my 7 calls to the call center. Xandros - they went a long way and then 2 weeks before they suddenly had an important meeting in Canada. Duh. Canonical - 'we have no rep in that area' (he meant South America! - we are in the Caribbean) and I could ask someone from a LOCO team in Colombia. Yeah Right. Colombians speak Spanish and we speak Dutch and English (and Spanish). An I wanted a suit. Red Hat - kept me dangling for a while until I forced the issue (with a certain Warren that was doing work on LTSP in Red Hat or Fedora) and got the answer - no. So we're an island of 130.000 people, we have 53.000 households, about 22.000 kids gong to school each day, and not a single 'sales' suit will come and talk before the government representatives that where at the conference. We are too small for commercial FOSS. We had Robin Miller; we had the guy who spearheads the transition of the City of Amsterdam (17.000 workstations); we had Ace Suares (grin) but none of the vendors where at least bit interested in selling free software. Estimates are we pay 1.7 million USD in licenses that could be replaced by FOSS. Same thing happend in 2004 - except that I then asked for and got a ... Micrfosoft Representative to show up (and none of the OS vendors). That was a dangerous game. I still shudder. Cheers, or not so much cheers, ace -- edubuntu-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users
