[Linux-bruxelles] Re: Campagne logiciel libre dans l'education

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:

> > [...]
> > > Je crois qu'il serait adéquat de faire la même chose chez nous.
> > 
> > Le probleme eternel reste de trouver les canaux appropries pour la
> > diffusion d'articles pareils. Il nous faut le support d'une majorite
> > des entreprises LL, et elles doivent former une entite qui puisse
> > faire le lobbying et la representation officiele chez les autorites...
> 
> Well,

Oops, I realize now that it seems as if I accuse the companies of
causing the whole problem :-) That's of course not true, but a
company-driven organisation would make much more impact when trying to
convince, for example, the manufacturers of educational software.

[...]
[...]
> How to break this loop ... ?

There is only one way: try to convince on of the important players in
the market to release something for Linux. The rest of them will
follow, no problem. That's the way that the databases, the
supercomputers, the servers, the special effects industries, etc. have
behaved in the last four or five years. Most IT people are followers
anyway :-)

So, the problem is convincing one of them. Or, in the context of
education, convincing the Ministery is equally well. In this respect,
it would help a lot if the Belgian Free Software companies could work
out a credible support scheme; without such a ``guaranteed success''
Education will not be keen on switching to support Free Software any
time soon...


Herman