I'm enjoying my short stay in Luxembourg, even though the hotel that was booked for me turned out to be full, the taxi I took late last night was involved in a minor accident, and I managed to break my glasses. These are, of course, only minor irritants given that my hosts at Eurocontrol, the European organisation responsible for air safety, are such good company.
I was asked to speak to an audience of air traffic control trainers from around Europe about the advantages and disadvantages of open source and free software, a space usually occupied by my colleague Jane Hart. With an hour to fill, I had plenty of time for interactivity, so had each participant complete their own top ten software tools list, to see how many were free (quite a lot). I also asked for volunteers to represent those who were already strong advocates of open source and those who were deeply sceptical. I asked the advocates to use the hour to come up with arguments against open source, and for the sceptics to come up with positive arguments. I probably screwed them up psychologically with this exercise but the results were interesting.
The biggest challenge I set myself was to demonstrate features of Firefox, OpenOffice, Moodle, MediaWiki, Gimp, Audacity, eXe, FreeMind and Wink, some of which I had only recently downloaded. Needless to say, each of these demonstrations went without hitch. Only two applications let me down by causing bugs - Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player - which must say something about free software don't you think?
Great post. I would love to here more details from those that were on deeply sceptical side. Is it fear of the unknown, previous bad experiences, or some other reason?
ReplyDeleteIn my team, the guy who's responsible for our site security is the one who won't allow anything open source, because of what he sees as the risk of vulnerabilities being very public and the knowledge of them spreading very fast.
ReplyDeleteHi Clive. I understand you're presenting at the eLearning Alliance in Edinburgh at the end of the month. Will it be on the same topic? Looking forward to meeting you again.
ReplyDeleteTo answer Gareth, the scepticism was typically along the lines of poor support, no company you can contract with, credibility issues with IT.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experience of "Free and easy in Luxembourg". I would like to be in touch with your in my future and wishing you a happy life.
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richard
Business Sales