Re: [Fsfe-uk] [Fwd: [Fsuk-manchester] Richard Stallman talk - Manchester (1st May)]

[Ian Lynch]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 22:48 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 17/04/2008, Ian Lynch <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > Whatever. The important points are
> 
> I agree with your points, apart from
> 
> >  If we can make money from certification we can use at least some of it
> >  to support producing free software and free learning content.
> 
> I'm not sure certification is good;

Well, its an industry worth 750m a year in the UK alone.

> I think its more worthwhile
> learning how to get paying clients and route around the
> certification-employment system...

It's easy to say route round it but how? What are your clients going to
pay for? If you say technical support services, that is fine but how do
you then compete with the established players that have spent years and
a lot of money building relationships with the customers? How do you
generate a market for your services when very little exists and you are
small with no investment resources? This is a strategy to get paying
clients and to work out an alternative model for generating development
resources other than selling software licenses. 

We are a small family business, we have a lot of experience installing
technology in schools - some of the very first Linux thin client
networks 5 years ago. We have extensive high level contacts in our
target market built up over 30 years and extensive professional
knowledge. It is learning from that experience that led to the
certification strategy based on Clay Christensen's theories of
disruptive innovation. The degree of success is still uncertain but I
think far more likely to have wide impact than trying to sell free
software systems directly to customers entrenched in multiple closed
source dependencies or simply selling to those few that have already
seen the light. We tried that.

Anyway time will tell. I'll let you know in a couple of years time if it
continues to work. So far we have set up a government accredited
awarding body endorsed by the sector skills council for IT and telecoms,
generated a business with an income of around 60-70k a year from scratch
that scaled up will be better than 50% profitable. We have groups in
South Africa, USA started, an EU project with partners in Germany,
Portugal and Turkey and a big potential project in Eastern Europe with
government and private investor backing. If the latter comes off and
things go to plan we'll end up being one of the biggest sellers of Linux
UMPC devices in the world. If it doesn't we'll still get a lot of kids
learning about free software.

Ian
-- 
New QCA Accredited IT Qualifications
www.theINGOTs.org

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