Science Forums 2

[geokker]

Looking at their site, I didn't notice any case studies, cost analyses or specific advantages to open source software (I didn't plough through it forensicly however). For the 'Windows user' which they mentioned as a specific target for their campaign, it's hard to see what the attraction is. Off the top of my head, I can think of these downsides:

1. Retraining. There is quite a jump from the Windows environment to anything else for average users.
2. Less featured, less user friendly, less documented, less mature applications. A perfect example is the seemingly reverse-engineered Sun OpenOffice tractor which I despair of every time I'm forced to use it because someone sent me an Excel file etc.
3. Poor hardware support. I have tweaked my Linux Nvidia drivers to within an inch of their lives and peformance still doesn't touch Windows XP (which was bad anyway).

Personally, while a long time advocate of open source (which I exclusively use) I think raising awareness is a good thing, but it's important to get realistic - everyone wants to be Microsoft - we live in a market economy, so it's simply the way to play. If people go away supporting the idea of non-proprietary open standards, that'll be an achievement. Have you tried opening a winmail.dat on Unix?