OK, now that I have your attention... I ask you to do one thing. Watch all 13 episodes of the Go Open televisions series. The series showcases the true value of Free Software and Open Source software. They show many instances of how and why Free Software and Open Source are changing the rules of the software market. Why they are about much more than getting better, faster, less expensive technology. How they are developed and by whom.

Even if you refuse to try using Linux and other such software you should at least try to understand the alternatives to Microsoft's monopoly-based software market. You'd be doing yourself a huge favor. The real value of Free Software and Open Source isn't the money you'll be saving or the viruses you'd be thwarting. Free Software is about the freedom to do anything whatsoever you want with your technology without having some distant third party standing in your way at every step.

The entire television series is released under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, No-derivatives license. Meaning, you can freely pass unaltered copies along to anyone. There are download instructions for Go Open on their website. In summary: Download and install Sun Java if you don't have it already. Download the Azureus BitTorrent client. And then open the first and second torrent files with Azureus. They are about 1300 MB combined. It should take about a hour on a broadband connection but could easily take much longer.

Also, I highly suggest you download and install the VLC media player to watch these videos. It seems like most other players have trouble playing the MPEG-4 video and AAC audio combination. The video may play fine in Quicktime on MacOS (and maybe Windows).

Labels: linux, windows