[Linux-aus] Giving Australians work with Open Source

[John Knight]

Something that I haven't noticed pointed out yet is
the problems and benefits that always arise from
moving from one system to another. From imperial to
metric, old tax-system to GST, etc. 

It's hard for anyone to claim that the older systems
genuinely made sense in comparison to the newer system
upgrading it, and once the new systems are in place
and have been running for years, people are generally
fine with it. What people seem to forget is that when
any of these new systems were being implemented,
millions of jobs were affected in one way or another
and people always had to make huge adjustments. 

Of course changing to Open Source is going to hurt
business in many ways, but in the end the benefits
will out-weigh the cost. Like a metric French car in
an English workshop full of 1/2" spanners, people are
scared/annoyed and don't want to change over from what
they know, "better the devil you know".

In the end though, when I work on our Land Rover
trying to think in imperial and what the next step up
or down in size is in spanners, I'm a lot happier
working on my metric Honda Prelude in which you simply
go up another millimetre.

In the end, Australian businessmen have no guts and
always slave to "whatever the industry's doing at the
time" instead of actually trying something new to
benefit themselves. Sure, my boss is going to actually
give Linux a go, despite having known of its existence
for years, and re-structure the weird pricing plans
he's had to adopt for the thousands of M$ boxes he's
made over the years, but that's a price I'm willing to
pay. ;)

John Knight

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