[conspire] Box needed for open source demo

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):

[much good ideas, for which, my thanks]

> Ever since then, I have been talking with everyone I meet about how 
> good OSS is, and why they should use it.  The primary obstacle that 
> I have encountered in getting people to switch is that no one wants 
> to be the first guinea pig.  OSS is still just too new to everyone.  
> Geeks love it, of course, for all the obvious reasons, but other 
> people in my sphere, simple end users, have no historical parallels 
> in their lives.  They are suspicious of free stuff.

I talk about this problem at some length in the Linux Documentation
Project's Linux User Group HOWTO, which I maintain.  I describe it as
the clash of two value systems:

o  Almost all people, almost all of the time, value things at
   _acquisition cost_:  The more you pay for something or the more 
   difficult it was to come by, the more it's assumed to be worth.

o  Computer geeks tend to value things at _use value_:  Things have
   value according to what you can do with them.  (This tends to 
   go along with what anthopologists call a "gift culture".)

These two methods for assessing something's worth clash violently when 
a geek and a non-geek are both discussing something seen as (1) free of
charge, and (2) stunningly useful.  I've seen such people talking past
each other, understanding each other not at all, painfully often.

The main part of my discussion, on that point, is here (section under
"Consultants"):  http://tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.4 --
and, actually, even more here under "The limits of advocacy":
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.2 

  Last, understand that the notion of "use value" for software is quite
  foreign to most people -- the notion of measuring software's value by
  what you can do with it. The habit of valuing everything at acquisition
  cost is deeply ingrained. In 1996, I heard a young fellow from Caldera
  Systems speak at a Berkeley, California LUG about the origins of Caldera
  Network Desktop (the initial name of their Linux distribution) in
  Novell, Inc.'s "Corsair" desktop-OS project: In surveying corporate CEOs
  and CTOs, they found corporate officers to be inherently unhappy with
  anything they could get for free. So, Caldera offered them a solution --
  by charging money.

Caldera's 1996 solution is analogous to what we consultants call
"invoice therapy":  If the customer isn't listening to you, maybe you
just aren't charging enough.  But a more-general and more-benevolent
solution to that cognitive problem eludes me.

In my own experience, what _really_ persuades people (in the First and 
Second Worlds, anyway -- with slightly beefier computers than DIYparts
aims to work with) is liveCD distributions:  Something a computer-owning
user can try with no risk whatsoever is tempting in ways that
installable distributions aren't.  Knoppix in particular has been
_amazingly_ effective at opening doors.

> What really tipped me toward using OSS is that I was able to 
> actually test out open source on a computer that was safe and would 
> not "harm" my old computer.  

Case in point!

More fuel for that particular fire (but not directly useful for
DIYparts.com) is this page of suggestions on how to use liveCD distros 
to diagnose/repair/debug Windows boxes:

"Windows Rescue Disk" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Legacy_Microsoft/


Getting back to your DIYparts.com planning:  One of my long-term
frustrations with computer users is that they often have older computers 
sitting in their closets.  Those computers remain potentially really
useful and valuable as Linux (or BSD) machines -- and would often pretty
make fast specimens in such roles -- but inevitably sit under a pile of
old shoes for a full decade or more, and then get (literally) dumped
only when they're feeble past the point of reason.

Why?  I puzzled away at that problem for a while, feeling (like you) the
extent of wastage involved.  And I figured it out:

Computers, like new cars, shed fair market value at a ghastly rate.
Your average buyer just doesn't want to face that fact.  All decade
long, the owner thinks of his/her former pride & joy as too valuable to
give away, perhaps deep down suspecting the truth:  that it'll garner
about ten cents on the dollar, if put up on eBay.

It's mentally less painful to transition one's mental model directly
from precious to landfill than it is to insert "worth something, albeit a
whole lot less" in-between those endpoints.

I don't have a solution.  I just have (and offer) a little bit of
insight into the problem.  ;->