I think great part of RMS arguments about free software can be understandable to everyone, including end users, and we should use that more than try to sell some product which has no price as main advantage.

If your product or service does not deliver benefits to your customers, sales are more fad and fancy than brand building. Your product is likely to become shelfware and your service likely won't see much repeat business.

To some extent, this is why the selling of software is difficult. Many of the benefits are hard to quantify in cost-benefit terms -- what is the dollar-value of ease-of-use, &c. Corporate bean counters want to see return on investment and ask, "what is the dollar-benefit?" Until we have good answers for this sort of question we sell "free" against "... its already go W__ installed ..."

~~~ 0;-Dan

All you have to do to sell Free software is show that it can get the job done quickly. Once users (or managers) see that it is powerful and immediate they are on board. You can explain their freedoms to them later, so they can feel even better about their choice.

KDE is trying to do that with the social desktop initiative, bringing KDE users closer together.

There are still many potential noob users that would appreciate freedom significantly and right off the bat or after a little warm-up work. This is particular true when dealing with the many developers that still have not caught on to Linux.

Also, freedom != vegetables in the sense that freedom doesn't have immediate drawbacks while vegetables are usually rumored not to taste that great. We can get free software to taste great (look great, etc), but vegetables are stuck with their tastes. [BTW, I like many vegetables.]

And do make sure to bring freedom up even in cases where initially it won't make as large of an impact.

In particular, we can undertake the separate job of *marketing freedom*. This is orthogonal to the selling of any particular piece of software and helps create a market for products and services based on freedom. Doing this also promotes the expansion of our healthy contribution-based community.

Can I ask, in what situation would you advocate for free software?

Here you say you don't think it should be mentioned to new users, and in that previous post you were advocating that no one should point out the ethical issues with using proprietary software to people from the *FOSS community*. When is anyone to learn I am asking myself?

When a future Novell/Suse release gets a bad review and all your users who have learned no values from you, jump ship to a perceived "better" proprietary system, I am sure you will wonder, as the "community guy", whether there might have been value in building a brand based upon ethics *and* quality.

Can I suggest you add a program to educate existing users about this software freedom. It might benfit for you in the longterm.

Christian.

* This IM client doesn't have ads; it was written by a community of programmers
* This word processor doesn't deactivate after 30 days; it's developed by a community of programmers
* I don't have the problem of multiple programs trying to open the same file, or some unwanted application repeatedly setting itself as the default application to open that file type; I get my software from a bunch of projects that cooperate rather than ones that are fighting

A DRM argument is probably possible. etc. And, they ask where it came from, or you mention it's called free software, or the idea was launched by a fed up programmer in 1983, etc. Not that hard.

We've got enough (corporate new best) friends who constantly change the subject from freedom to branding/features. That furthers their agenda, not the agenda of people who care about the long term sustainability of free software or open source.