I should probably do the same...
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| Author | Content |
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| wjl Jun 16, 2005 11:20 PM EDT |
Yeah, I must admit I only read the headline of that article here in LXer, but something which happened some 2 minutes ago made me think I should do this, too - educate our software developers about FOSS. We are a Microsoft shop here. We develop software and hardware for healthcare - to be more precise, for intensive care and emergency rooms. Tho our software is written in Java and therefor 'portable', noone ever thought of porting it to some other operating system - neither the client, nor the server side. Sometimes I think I'm the only FOSS and Linux advocate in the house. My job is being a network administrator. A few minutes ago, I went down for a smoke with some colleagues, 2 of them being software developers. One of them was telling the other about some problems with JPGs, and when he mentioned licensing problems, I asked him why he doesn't take PNGs instead - they would even have more features like transparency and so on. He asked "yeah, but do you know a graphics program which is capable of producing these?", and I answered: "sure - all of them". He looked puzzled and begun talking about some (Windows-only) picture viewers, so I told him about *real* graphics programs. I said: "You either go deep into your pockets and buy Photoshop, or you use the Gimp". Of course he asked me for a link, so I said my best bet would be http://www.gimp.org, like with almost any other great and free software. Coming back to my (Debian-based) workstation, I saw that headline again, and I thought: "yeah, that's how we do it. We *have to* promote free and open source software like this. Educate the guys who are considered to be more knowledgeable (and better paid) than yourself, and one perfect day they wouldn't only use Firefox but OpenOffice and all that other stuff. Then would be the perfect day to show them my workstation here, which runs absolutely the same - with the difference that I have one of the best operating systems in the world running these software packages, while they are still hindered to open mail attachments without being afraid ;-)". Even the furthermost journey begins with a little step, n'est-ce pas? Cheers, wjl aka Wolfgang Lonien |
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