[CS-FSLUG] The Moral Foundation of Free Software

[Don Parris]

On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 11:27 -0600, Tim Young wrote:
> I agree with both Fred and Aaron...
> 
> On one side, users do not need two weeks to learn a new OS.  But then, I have run
> into users who quit their jobs instead of facing the upgrade from Win95 to
> Win98.  I had one panic attack phone call when someone clicked on an icon on
> their computer, and as the software was loading it flashed up the registration
> page.  It had her supervisor's name on it instead of hers.  She thought her
> supervisor had taken control of her computer and so she could not work on it.
> And she would not.  I ended up driving 2 hours, opening up regedit and putting
> her name in the registration, and then she could get back to work.
> 
> The short of it?  Never underestimate the non-technical side of the switchover.
> 
>     - Tim Young
> 
<SNIP>

To be fair, I was explaining FOSS on a pretty basic level with one
pastor, who asked, "so this is a program you wrote?"  Arrrggghhhh!  I
had "assumed" (with all that word connotes) that in my discussion he
would understand that there was just too much software out there for me
to have been the author of it all.

I also asked a lady if she uses MS Office.  Since she didn't seem to get
what I was asking, I threw out "Microsoft Word" as an example.  "Oh
yeah, I use that for connecting to the Internet." I finally got her to
tell me (with some degree of understanding) that she uses Outlook for
e-mail.  Sheesh!  I have taught classes to folks as illiterate.

To me, this only offers a great opportunity.  I have suggested several
times (only half-jokingly) that the admin should tell the staff this is
the Longhorn beta release. ;)  Obviously, we wouldn't want to mislead
our users.  Still, many of them would not know the difference.