Re: Grants: Educating grant giving institutions and non-profits.

[Kevin Forge <forge@usa.net>]

Jeff Martin wrote:
> 
> I was going to say free money but I was afraid someones
> spam filter might reject this email.
>      I was looking around at the possibility of grants that
> Linux groups could apply for. Unfortunately the examples of funded
> projects that I found seem to indicate that grantees were using
> their funds to purchase commercial software for their projects.
>      In addition to applying for grants I think it may be wise
> to educate grant giving institutions about free software and
> ask them to concider free software issues in their grant
> application process.
>      Non-profits and government institutions are a natural match
> for free software. Imagine if we could convince a large organization
> like the United Way that they could save hundreds of thousands of
> dollars by switching to Applix running on Linux.
>                                                 -Jeff
They would only save support costs by switching to Applix since it's
still cheaper to buy a Dell persuaded with MSOffice and Win95 than
to buy a VAReserch with Applix loaded.  Applix is priced like a niche
product.  I.e. High.

However I have finally got KOffice to compile and even in early Alpha
it looks like the future.  These people built a desktop in 2 years.
with a year of work in KOffice it looks like it will be done in similar
time and with humbler system requirements ( fast on a Cyrix P166+ 64Meg
even with a ton of Debugging code and Netscape in the background ).

There are also rummers of GOffice based on the same Corba the KOffice 
uses.  Perhaps we could get one of our more eloquent lobbyists to
convince
a few of these nonprofits that between them they spend at least an 
order of magnitude more on Office apps and OSs than it would cost to pay
a dozen of the programers in these projects to quit the corent job and
work full time on what they love :)