Comments on: UKUUG - “More than just profit” talk

By: Fiona Nicholson, Education Otherwise

Fiona Nicholson, Education Otherwise — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:34:10 +0000

Interested to hear more about support co-operatives!

Fiona, Trustee Education Otherwise + proud user of Free Software

By: Tweets that mention GoodGNUs » Blog Archive » UKUUG - “More than just profit” talk -- Topsy.com

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:18:23 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Woods, MJ Ray. MJ Ray said: read http://ur1.ca/rpuy Sounds like a good talk from @richardsmedley on #foss and #coops earlier today [...]

By: Richard Smedley

Richard Smedley — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:45:11 +0000

Agreed about the lock-in - that’s why understanding who owns your data, and in what format it is, was part of our IT Strategy courses (at MOST, and at M6-IT - I’d love to revive them).

Since the VCS “LUG” idea got nowhere I’m unsure of where to go next to promote FOSS support. All ideas welcome ;)

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:14:39 +0000

Well done for raising this banner at UKUUG!

In a lot of cases, the web-enabled free software replacements are already there, but the lock-in makes it too expensive to escape because no-one included it in the budget when it was sold to the organisation and it’s a bit embarassing to admit it now, so the exit cost gets attributed to the free software replacements, which seems a bit unfair.

Another oft-quoted problem is the lack of support, but us support co-operatives do exist, even if we are sometimes kept out by things like the NCVO-Microsoft promotions and certain support organisations that criticise free software and think it’s all about price not freedom.