I agree that from the outset

Steve Thompson — Sun, 27 May 2007 09:45:30 +0000

I agree that from the outset the most important thing is awareness raising and apart from having a broad list of many options perhaps people should be encouraged to spend a short period of experimentation, playing with as many different options as possible. Of course this depends on the time available to do this.

The reason I mention this is because once an individual or small org has settled on an app or platform it may be difficult to change as the learning curve for something new can seem steep when you've allready surmounted one mountain. Sometimes this has to be done when for instance your app of choice is suddenly no longer there or aquired by an operation who's ethics you disagree with or you find it's not as great as you thought it was.

For example PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS. [ok it's not FOSS] Great digital image tool - cut down from big brother/sister Photoshop and cheaper too. However from version 2 onwards it got steadily more crappy until at version 4 many people hate it and fear the imminent V5. To jump to the FOSS equivelent GIMP is difficult because there are many differences in how the two apps are laid out. (somewhat addressed by GIMPSHOP but I only heard about that oen recently)

What I try to do in my own work is teach people generic skills i.e. "image editing" rather than "Photoshop" - etc etc

Open source, proprietary and free software

David Wilcox — Sun, 27 May 2007 09:12:07 +0000

Over at Opengender, Paula Graham has a great article Who's afraid of free software? which touches on issues we discussed at our workshop. Paula argues people in small organisations are frightened off the use of open source because they think support is a problem - and this is a gender issue:

Technology and Social Action - Open source, proprietary and free software - Comments

I agree that from the outset

Open source, proprietary and free software