Selling FreeBSD

[Paul Robinson]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:07:29PM +0100, Aled Morris wrote:

> One of the best targets then would be the academic/schools supply sector
> through the NGfL approved suppliers and the purchasing agencies.

I know. I'm not going to go into it all here, but there are the basics of a 
business plan in my head which would secure quite a few people's employment 
in the UK/Europe at least on FBSD. The academic sector is probably one of 
the best to touch on, especially if a set of tools is given so that a 
teacher without specialist training can "manage" a lab of kids, particularly 
around submitting work, setting up new pieces of work for them to do, etc. 
without getting bogged down into the tech.

I know the central goverment purchasing guys are getting REALLY hacked off
with Microsoft right now because of the new annual licesning model, and it
might be the right time to "do a Munich" on them, and point out that on one
case in Munich where they invested in Linux (easier to sell to academics
because GPL seems more academic-friendly from an altruistic point of view)
in one year they made cost savings against Microsoft, that totalled enough
to buy 100 new laptops. Or 10 new teachers. Or 10,000 new books for the 
libraries.

It's an easy sales case once the code is in place, and that means making it 
easier to use, manage, look after, and deploy. Custom builds, firewall boxes 
that filter out adult content that can be deployed with a mouse click, 
better X-based user management, X-based storage management, and so on, and 
so on, and so on...

It's actually not that much work once we realise that all the ports we need 
are out there, but need managing better and the install we offer has to be 
bigger and better.

But enough. Let's talk about this on Saturday. Then on Sunday, we'll take 
over the world. :-)

-- 
Paul Robinson