[vox] Open Source savings - Letter to Sacbee

[JF]

Letters like that are cool, but unfortunately ineffective. If you're going 
to preach open source, you need to take little steps. Quite frankly, NOBODY 
is gonna just install Linux onto their computer right off the bat. (well, 
ok.. ALMOST nobody)

If you want to really to promote Open Source.. now is really the time to do 
it. Here is a plan of action that won't take much money, but will have a 
very STRONG impact.

Since there is no money in the State of California for ANYTHING, its hard 
to beat free. I suggest that the club take donations in the form 
of  1-spindles of CDR's, 2- Labels, 3- CD mailers, 4- Stamps, and 5- Time.

Say we target 250 distributions.

We send them to ALL of the Elementary, Middle, and High Schools in the 
immediate area, then fan out AWAY from the Bay Area (who in theory have 
more money and are more ingrained by MS. Also, the outside areas will have 
a bigger funding crunch and would probably be more likely to go to an Open 
Source solution.)

Have a nice letter written explaining that the club understands the funding 
problems and we have a solution to "save them money", administrative types 
always respond to that.

How they ask? OpenOffice.Org... its not Linux, but its a first step. Hook 
them on OpenSource first, when it penetrates, the OS could be next. In the 
letter, do the math for them.... $100 per copy of MS Office at educators 
prices. And thats every 2 to 3 years (MS updates you know). So in theory, 
using OpenOffice.Org will save them $200 per machine, every 2 to 3 years. 
in ten years, that could be as high as $300-400. If they have 50 
machines,   say at $350 in ten years, thats $17,500!

Include a distribution of OpenOffice.Org on a CD, with a very professional 
looking label on it (for credibility sake).

Make sure there are the names of the officers, contact information, and 
phone numbers in the letter so they don't think its some kind of virus or 
something. I'm sure at the minimum it will get installed by quite a few 
school administrators. Hopefully, it will become part of their "cost solution."

Although we're not pushing Linux specifically at this time, prominently 
have "Linux" scattered all over the letter. ie... "LINUX users group..", 
"had its beginnings with the Linux users, but is now available for 
Microsoft platforms as well as Apple OS X.." and on the disk it self... 
"Microsoft version... MacIntosh OS X version... and Linux version.." 
Subliminal marketing at its best. Embed the concept of Linux now so that it 
will recall into the administrators memory later.  Remember, they can 
receive the same cost benefit over Windows with Linux... so they could 
potentially save $35,000 across ten years. Wow... and their hardware 
requirements won't go up as radically so they only need to upgrade their 
computers every five years instead of every three years. So one computer 
cycle less every ten years. How much is that? At about $1000 per machine, 
$50,000 every ten years, on top of $35,000 for software.. WHOA!! $85,000 on 
50 systems!

I've actually been giving out OpenOffice distributions to clients for some 
time now. If anyone wants to start something like this, I will donate the 
first spindle of 100 CD's to the cause and some duplicating time.

James

At 04:46 PM 1/18/2004, you wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 07:20:27AM -0800, Donald Childs wrote:
> > Saw this in this morning's SacBee/Letters to the Editor
> >
> > Open Source savings
> > http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/8115977p-9048089c.html
>
>Cool!  Thanks for the pointer, Donald (and welcome to the lists).
>
>I wonder if Paul (author of the letter) is involved with any of the LUGs
>in the area, or if he knows about them?  Anyone know who he is?
>
>-bill!
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