ltsp local apps + nat + ....

[Ace Suares]

R. Scott Belford wrote:
<snip>
> Canonical left me hanging on meetings with the CIO of The University
<snip>

I was organizing an Open Source Seminar (see www.ictopcuracao.com) and 
tried to get at least one 'suit' from one of the vendors.

Novell - no reply to my 7 calls to the call center.

Xandros - they went a long way and then 2 weeks before they suddenly had 
an important meeting in Canada. Duh.

Canonical - 'we have no rep in that area' (he meant South America! - we 
are in the Caribbean) and I could ask someone from a LOCO team in 
Colombia. Yeah Right. Colombians speak Spanish and we speak Dutch and 
English (and Spanish). An I wanted a suit.

Red Hat - kept me dangling for a while until I forced the issue (with a 
certain Warren that was doing work on LTSP in Red Hat or Fedora) and got 
the answer - no.

So we're an island of 130.000 people, we have 53.000 households, about 
22.000 kids gong to school each day, and not a single 'sales' suit will 
come and talk before the government representatives that where at the 
conference.

We are too small for commercial FOSS.

We had Robin Miller; we had the guy who spearheads the transition of the 
City of Amsterdam (17.000 workstations); we had Ace Suares (grin) but 
none of the vendors where at least bit interested in selling free 
software. Estimates are we pay 1.7 million USD in licenses that could be 
replaced by FOSS.


Same thing happend in 2004 - except that I then asked for and got a ... 
Micrfosoft Representative to show up (and none of the OS vendors). That 
was a dangerous game. I still shudder.

Cheers, or not so much cheers,

ace