Why don't more businesses take advantage of open source software?
Monday, June 28th, 2010 at
00:26
Linux, or even apps such as open office would cut costs tremendously.
Tagged with: Linux • open office
Filed under: Open Source
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You have a perfectly valid point there however if you start using different software to what the user is already used to you would have to train them on new software, this means you are paying people to learn how to use the new system and your work won’t get done. If you think about the average office computer user, they wont have Linux at home they will most likely have xp or vista as with Microsoft office. That person will have gone to a computer shop and said i want a computer that i can type up work on and they gave them lets say a vista machine with office 2007, if they can then go to work knowing that its the same as at home and they don’t need to learn anything new then they wont get confused or need any training. I have often wondered this myself but its probably best to keep the open source to the servers where only experts can access, that way less things SHOULD go wrong.
Hope this helps
The smart ones already do. Microsoft relies on peoples ignorance to sell their products, other than the OS itself people do not require any other MS products, as there are always alternatives that are cheaper or open source. How are people suppose to switch to OpenOffice if they don’t know about it’s existence, or that there even is something other than MS Office.
Think about. Most people call a word processor, Microsoft Word, they call spread sheets excel, and they always refer to slideshows as Powerpoint; it is that heavily brain washed into them.
It is basically a matter of education.
Part of the education can start here at BOSS Publications…
http://jcbydwi.prophp.org/
The current BOSS Publications "Profiting from the New Global Resource" details the advantages and benefits open source offers to business end-users. Basically providing the indepth educations needed to make an informed decision. It also details methods of distribution and implemention of open source applications functionality.
A lot of them simply don’t even know about open source software. Others are simply afraid. I work at a university, and my boss is a huge MS fan – he’d never even heard of open source apps like OpenOffice or Gimp, and he doesn’t trust them. It’s frustrating because we have users who want Photoshop but could get by with Gimp or Paint.net, but I’m the only person advocating for that solution. Another problem is that many people don’t know how to use the open source applications. I’ve worked at schools that actually teach classes on MS Office; students wouldn’t have a clue when faced with OpenOffice, even though they’re similar.
It’s very frustrating. However, this is one potential good that may come out of the economic downturn.