What is Digg?3 Comments
- wallclimber, on 10/22/2008, -0/+7"Why is it that only the little people are brave enough to say this?"
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That line really got me to thinking. I definitely qualify as a "little people" person. Barely 5ft tall, nearly 60 years old, I'm not a programmer, nor a particularly smart or well educated person, but I spend many evenings and weekends helping people with their computers. In the last 8 months I've installed one version of GNU/Linux, or another, on over 40 computers (yes, I know, a mere drop in the ocean, but it's still something I am very proud of). Even helped a friend set up her business office systems this summer, which was WAY beyond my skill set...but between the two of us we got it figured out (thank you Google!).
Several other friends have bought Macs this year as well, so the number of Windows users I know, these days, has dwindled considerably. A mighty small slice of the Universe, to be sure, but still huge change in less than a year. Pretty amazing to me.
Whether anyone wants to believe it, or not, the main concern of the majority of people I've talked to was Freedom. Not cost. People are just plain sick and tired of Microsoft (and Nortons, McAfee, etc.).
Quite frankly, no corporation in the world could buy this kind of word-of-mouth advertising. The results can't be documented, there's no way to accurately monitor the growth or to know how successful it might be, until it's too late to stop it from happening. Maybe that's for the best.
My thought is that, if there were a sudden flood of fancy advertisments on tv, Linux would look to the world just like the rest of the big software vendors. Which would be wrong, because Linux isn't a software vendor, it's just software that's created differently. So maybe it's right that it's also "advertised" differently.
There are so many dedicated people that work extremely hard to make Free Software available to us. Maybe the least us "little people" can do is to BE brave enough to contribute some time to help promote that software to the world. (I bet we can at least do a better job than Seinfeld :) - db113456, on 10/22/2008, -0/+4This article is the deepest and most well spoken in at least a decade. Kudos to Carla Schroder. Great point, Linux and free software, free standards and free file formats are kept as a shameful secret across the board. And i can provide a large horde of examples to prove my point here.
- matthekc, on 10/21/2008, -1/+2Well if your even slightly tech savvy I think you have heard of Linux.
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