One of the guys in the office where I work is a true capitalist. He says he pays for software because it keeps the economy going. I can kind of see his argument, but my take is “why should I pay if I don’t have to?”.
I’ve had a wodge of Ubuntu CDs on my desk for a while. The collection has grown to include Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and The Open CD.
My collegue has been complaining that his installation of Word/Excel and Outlook has become somehow screwed up. It’s likely with a little work he could fix it, but I really don’t want to offer help in that area. I do my best to avoid supporting Windows wherever possible if I don’t have to, it’s just too time consuming.
He picked up one of The Open CDs from my desk a few weeks ago and said he’d look at it over the weekend. I figured he was being polite and humouring me. However he works away from his family so he often has little to keep him occupied at the weekends so he’s actually got time to “play” with software on his own PC.
Today he told me that he’d installed OpenOffice from The Open CD and that “Hey, I don’t really need that Microsoft stuff anymore!?”. I tried not to whoop and hollar and say “I told you so” and I managed quite well. I listened how he told me about formatting problems with his existing CV in a word document. I explained that information about the Word document format is not publicly released by Microsoft so OpenOffice developers are working in the dark a bit when trying to figure it out. He accepted that as a valid reason for the quirkyness of the formatting.
All in all quite a success. He’s really the last person in the office I’d expect to use free software. The fact that it works, is free, and allows him to run multiple office products (OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, AbiWord etc) side by side seems advantageous to him.
I am happy for him.
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I do like the subtle approach. When I first started using Linux, I could not understand why anybody would not want to use it. Therefore I would push it at anybody who would stop long enough to listen. As you can imagine, I was not very successful. Now I don’t bother.
If anybody asks, I will tell them and having a number of Cd’s available seems like a good idea. That way, the software can do the talking.
After we’d talked about some work stuff..
Bloke: “Are you a salesman for..”
[looks at CD cover]
Bloke: “Ubuntu?”
Me: “No, more of an advocate I think”
Bloke: “What is it?”
Me: “Software”
Bloke: [look quizzical]
Me: “Like Windows, Outlook, Office, that kind of thing”
Bloke: “Can I try it?”
Me: “Sure, help yourself.”
Bloke: “Can I try it without screwing anything up”
Me: “Sure, stick it in your PC then turn it on, boot off the CD and have a play, it won’t touch your hard disk, it all runs off the CD.”
Bloke: “Is there some documentation”
Me: “Yeah, on the CD, click the help icon on the toolbar.”
He walked away with a CD.
I find it hard to know what to say when people say “what is this?”. It depends on the person I think. I tailor my reply depending on what I think they’ll “get”.