On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 9:14 PM, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
don't deserve FOSS. Youngsters seem to be more receptive to new ideologies than the older ones. However *all* my customers know about
True, if you compare with the older bunch, there's obviously more youngsters willing to accept new technologies. But as a contra view, I've met so many youngsters (engineers, might I add) who are the first to dismiss Linux as 'not user friendly' just because they were forced to use it for some project and it didn't quite behave like windows. Even telling them that my sister has figured out how to do everything on Mandriva on her laptop (she's a psychologist, not even close to being a techie) wouldn't convince them -- they'd say that I'm fibbing and hold on to their very dear impression they had made (or heard about -- shocker isn't it?) years ago.
But at the same time, people at work were surprised last year when I made some art for our UI using some hippy software called GIMP -- they thought Photoshop was the only thing that could do such beautiful things. People had started to adopt it since it's also apparently a bit easier to use compared to Photoshop until our client decided to not authorize its use for reasons best known to them. Our Analysts find OOo Draw very useful to draw charts and design specs, but nobody wants to use Writer or Calc since they'll have to give up the comfort zone of Word and Excel.
The only libre software that seems to have truly global acceptance is Mozilla Firefox. I guess marketing matters more than anything else.