vinay sreenivasa wrote:
This is the big mistake that people not familiar with IT (and FOSS ) make. It's not the price, it's the Freedom. One should stress that IT is crucially dependent on the software to achieve it's magic.
We completely agree. Governments look at cost in a big way and we have been try ing to get across the point that freedom matters and what advantages freedom br ings. However, while we do not stress on the cost angle, we cannot ignore it either. For eg.when governments can use Open Office and save lakhs of rupees on license fee for MS office, they should be going for Open Office and should not spend p ublic money on proprietary software.
Talking about freedom to newbies should always be accompanied with practical examples, case studies or experiences or else people generally don't understand what is software freedom.