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