Re: New to the group

[Kristian Rink]

> le sam 06-04-2002 à 12:03, Christian Selig a écrit :
 
> > The situation is even worse. There is a Microsoft/Intel partner project 
> > "Lernen für die Zukunft" (Teaching for the future), which consists of 
> > training materials for MS Windows and MS Office and cheap copies. It is 
> > even supported by politicians who view Microsoft as an innovative 
> > company with great products. With this initiative, Microsoft tries to 
> > secure itself a long-lasting monopoly on the school sector.
> 
> 
> Producing free multilingual training materiel for free production
> software as Evolution, OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnumeric, The Gimp may help
> a lot. It will help to convince people using free software

Well, I am willing to spend quite some energy on trying it this way, but,
honestly, I am not sharing your optimism about this. The experience I've made,
here in Germany, so far, is that most people working with computers don't
know about word processing software, about spreadsheets, about web browsers or
e-mail clients, but they know Microsoft(c) Word(c), Microsoft(c) Excel(c),
Microsoft(c) Internet Explorer(c) or Microsoft(c) Outlook Express(c). I have
seen a lot of people being totally unable to get working with StarOffice for the
simple (yet stupid) reason that the text files created with StarOffice don't
end in .doc . So, I guess even before doing anything to give people an easy
step into some great free software products (allow me to use this term in
this connection), we basically should try to do something about people's general
reception of computers, about telling people that you don't necessarily need
any Microsoft software to get your letters written, to get your mail done,
to browse the web or to do whatever you want to do with your computer. IMHO
the first step to make people interested in some alternatives is to actually
*show* them that there are some. I am by heart interested in how to get this
done in an effective way. :)
 
> May be could spend some energy there. We should have some reflexion on
> how to achieve that.

Full ACK, here. First and foremost, as stated above, I would see it
incredibly necessary to make people aware that, for each task to be done with a
computer, there is a whole category of (both free and non-free) software one 
might
utilize to get this special task done. I think it would be a good thing to
have some guides the way "What do I need to [write e-mails | write letters |
post-process my scanned images | listen to music | <insert-your-task-here> ]
with my computer?" This way we possibly would at least make some more people
aware that there actually *is* a lot of different software out there serving
right the same purpose.

Secondly, another problem I am sometimes seeing is that people are having
severe difficulties in seperating different fields of software, ending in
statements like "But I am running Microsoft Windows, so I also *need* to use
Microsoft Office for working." In fact I spent quite some time explaining to one
of our customers that, for storing *.doc - files on a file server, it doesn't
matter at all whether this server runs MS Windows, Solaris, GNU/Linux,
FreeBSD or whatever I could come up with. This, anyhow, probably is a little bit
more difficult to be done, and I don't quite know how to get it done, since at
least around here people are, when thinking about computers, just too much
tied to the Microsoft terminology, to the Windows understanding of how things
are.

Comments, anyone? :)

Cheers,
Kris

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