Richard Forth wrote: > Sorry If I caused any offence No offence taken at all - it gave me the opportunity to raise something that's been bugging me for a while.
It's a perception that we need to address, that's all (and pretending that it isn't there or that it isn't sometimes justified isn't a solution). The idea that OOo will do unless you really need to spend money on Office, or that the only reason you'd stick Linux on a PC is to avoid the MS "tax" (often as little as about £20 on mass produced machines), does nothing to promote FOSS. It's been possible to buy cheap Linux PCs for ages, almost always as a way to keep the cost down; if there is the opportunity for buyers to give feedback it'll be littered with "really good cheap PC, wiped Linux and installed XP no problem". We risk positioning Linux and FOSS in general as "great if you can't afford MS stuff" which is ludicrous when you think about it, and there are plenty of examples of Linux/FOSS being chosen for non-financial reasons (Apache/PHP/Firefox/etc). But there are plenty of examples where Linux/FOSS falls short, and where they exist the only people we can blame is ourselves, so if we can find a project we can contribute to we should - I think we'd gain a lot from it. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
