Hey Karen, welcome to (hell control W) the community.

So, after listening to people gripe about this story today, and yesterday, on IRC in email, on various blogs, where Mr Starks was talking about an email he received, I got to thinking. Just to give you context if you don't know what I am on about, click here.

People all around planet Earth are chatting about this story, online, in blogs, IRC . . . even over at UDS I heard it mentioned.

Firstly, is it really a story? I don't think so.

What it is it seems to me to be happening here is a piece of off the wall publication. Rather than engage with someone who appears to have made a mistake of a pretty high order, of the receiver, the receivers actions, and where the receiver is within the FLOSS camp, the receiver of the mail published it.

This is in my books, bad form and very unnecessary.

What should have been done? Perhaps, something as simple as a telephone call, asking any of the following:

Ask the person did they believe they were right, and explain Microsoft are selling GNU/linux "seats" these days.

Ask the person did they believe they were right, and explain to them what IBM are doing these days with their desktop offering.

Ask the person them to ask someone who is sitting there with their ASUS eee pc running GNU/Linux.

Or ask them to ask the child with a machine from the OLPC project running Sugar. Instead, in its place what we find is that the site vilified the person who made a judgement call about something which did not hold to be true.

In my opinion it this would have been smarter. To be told the receiver sent a copy or several of various FLOSS journals with with a few sample live CDs, and followed it up with an offer to demonstrate and install GNU/Linux for "Karen", and in fact I hope it is not the teachers right name. (In fact I really hope it did not actually happen.)

Reader numbers for this story would have been a lot lower. Impact would have been a lot less, in fact this would not have been written.

So was it a good thing? No, I think not. What we have here is a failure to communicate with someone who does not know what we in the FLOSS community have to offer. So the next time someone does not "get" FLOSS, don't bother to explode, when you tell someone they are wrong the first thing they do is put up their back.

Firstly I would urge you to do it better, simply because you can. When others don't get FLOSS, don't get mad, instead treat it as a challenge and ask them simple questions, such as have they ever thought why you have to secure certain operating systems with third party software?

Did they know your favourite desktop KDE/GNOME/FVWM or whatever one you run on your GNU/Linux or *BSD desktop does not need these clock cycle hungry?

The simple point to explain all this is, not all software is built the same, but I suspect it is. Did they know with FLOSS you don't face silly artificial limits, physics is the main limit of your software? Where limits exist it is not on the number of users or the amount of queries they can perform on a database. Did they know if they wanted to they could have the source code even if they don't use it, and with it they can learn how things work, they can share it with their neighbour, they can run it for any purpose again no silly limits, they can alter it to improve it and share that work too?

When they reply they didn't, perhaps you should offer them a live CD and explain that you can install it for them if they want. So they have two weeks to play with it and you will work together with them and help them over the finish line.

Welcome them to the community, start working on the next person.