Australian SMEs aren't paying nearly enough attention to Linux considering the top priority for their IT managers is to "reduce costs", but despite the prevailing attitude, it won't take much for open source to have a far greater impact in the near future, according to research released today.
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16 years 30 weeks 2 days 6 hours ago
Comfort in Subjugation
Such users are probably more comfortable being subject to the programs of proprietary software authors over choosing to change their investments into migrating to free software and funding the development of free software.
For every Sydney SME business that I have done business with, I always find instances of helplessness because of the lack of right to tinker with the code. Whenever I teach them about being free to help themselves through free software, the overwhelming response is that "migrating from system x to system w costs so much money that we'd rather put up with the nonsense of helplessness over making a swift (and probably painful/costly) move to free software."
Moving away from proprietary systems tend to be painful because they are intended to keep you subject to them. They attract you with convenient and powerful features but keep you completely helpless whenever you have a requirement that the program doesn't fulfill. Such subjugation does not occur with free software; the power will always belong to the user and not any proprietor.