On Wednesday 21 Jan 2009, vinay sreenivasa wrote: > [snip] > We completely agree. Governments look at cost in a big way and we > have been try ing to get across the point that freedom matters and > what advantages freedom br ings. > However, while we do not stress on the cost angle, we cannot ignore > it either. For eg.when governments can use Open Office and save lakhs > of rupees on license fee for MS office, they should be going for Open > Office and should not spend p ublic money on proprietary software.
Unfortunately that argument falls through if MS gives their products away for free (as they're doing increasingly more often). If I push FOSS because it is cheaper/faster/better then I don't have any retort when MS starts giving away better, even faster software for free. I'd try to focus on the inherent advantages of FOSS: not tied to any company, easily extensible, easy to localise, easy to customise for specific environments (there's no separate LinuxME :) , etc. And when all else fails throw up the ``foreign hand'' bogey and spread FUD about the NSAKEY and similar backdoors put into Winduhs by a foreign government and how they'll be able to track our every confidential communication if we use Winduhs :) FUD rocks! Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
