[kwlug disc.] "people don't respect what they don't pay for"

[Rick]

Raul Suarez <rarsa at yahoo.com> writes:
> The key here is that you are going around their
> natural defenses:
> - You are not saying that they should use it, just
> that they should consider it.
> - You are not saying that all FLOSS is better, just
> that it may be.
> - You are not suggesting going FLOSS crazy, just that
> it can be integrated.

Here's another way to approach adoption of FLOSS:
pick the low-hanging fruit. In other words,
the FLOSS community should have some kind of chart
or tree that guides new-to-FLOSS-people into easy, incremental
stages of FLOSS.

For starters, FLOSS-apps that work in Microsoft such as FireFox.
Then limited apps like print-servers or turn-key web servers
or OpenOffice for the least demanding users office workers.
Ideally, have an install-disc that sets up people in, say, Ubuntu
with OpenOffice.

So have a gradual, incremental campaign that gets the resistant FLOSS
propspects in slowly. In a sense, the FLOSS community is building
such incremental beachheads ever day.

However, if we had something like a state-diagram
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_diagram), this process
could be sped up. I imagine that others already have such
a flowchart/system to get people incrementally into FLOSS.
Those of us with more business experience (than myself)
could probably sketch out an initial state-diagram
to get people's toes into the FLOSS ocean.