[NH LoCo] I'm writing an opinion piece for the Concord Monitor -- care to weigh in?

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Ben, Tom, et. al.,

Thank you for the kind words.

I meant it when I said:

> I hope I have partially answered your question.  There is actually a
> lot more to this, but I am tired tonight.

and I do intend on writing more about it....and then some.

I took particular offense at this attack, and I will be talking to
someone in an hour about what we can do to set this straight.

I anticipate "at least" a blog on it, if not a trip to Washington.

By the way, in my last email I tagged a footnote about losing five
BILLION dollars a day as a world economy, and forgot to put the footnote
in, so here is the footnote:

There are approximately one billion desktop computers in the world
today.  If each one of those computers causes the user fifteen minutes
of lost time a day due to viruses, SPAM, improperly maintained software,
improperly functioning software, reboots, etc, that is approximately
five dollars (averaged over different wage levels, and assuming
"Western" wages).  I do not even consider the issues of employee morale,
or other intangibles, where if employee morale was better the employees
would work more efficiently.

One billion computers times five dollars a day.

Realizing that those types of numbers are hard to comprehend, think of
100 "knowledge workers" using their computers.  Losing fifteen minutes a
day because the software does not work the way they think it should
means that you lose three "people", or it is like only 97 of your
employees actually made it to work, and they had no excuse for missing
work.

Now I am no Pollyanna, and I know that it is hard to get to 100%
"software productivity", but at least with FOSS you have a chance to
analyze what is wrong and fix some of it.  So if you could hire a FOSS
developer to improve the situation to the point that workers lost only
five minutes a day instead of 15, then you would certainly be ahead.

And if hiring a consultant or other FOSS person to help you do that is
the answer, you now have the argument.

Finally, I quoted a really LOW figure for the amount of time "lost"
because of software you can not change.  I did not include changing the
software to get greater utility out of it, or meeting your business
needs more.

Warmest regards,

md