Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[ian]

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 11:45, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 08:59, ian wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 22:48, Neil Darlow wrote:
> > > Hi All,
> > > 
> > > I had the following forwarded to me via an original post to the Milton 
> > > Keynes
> > > LUG mailing list. I think it demonstrates some consideration for FLOSS by 
> > > BECTA.
> > 
> > BECTA is conducting a TCO study of FLOSS.
> 
> > They
> > really have to do something about FLOSS as is exists in the education
> > domain.
> 
> Again I appreciate the constructive directions taken by Neil Darlow and
> Ian but at the same time would like to point out that I saw on
> lugmasters list M$ is spamming lugmasters  (last night ?) to conduct
> another 'study'.
> This should sum up the destructive effect on free software by market
> researches.

Not much we can do about it. But if the TCO comes out in our favour,
fine, if it doesn't, we all know that TCO can be used to prove anything
so we discredit it. We just have to play the political game. There is no
real choice. TCO studies are not rational, they are political and
started as marketing tools to show why expensive stuff was good value
for money. What might be useful is for some academics to come out and
rubbish the whole concept. There are too many variables in too many
different  circumstances to come to a generalisation so its just not
science.

-- 
ian <address@hidden>