free software t.v.

[jdodson]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39174917,00.htm

i thought it was interesting as to who was sponsoring the show 8)

[Huxley]

Some interesting and fun posts
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/11/24/236244.shtml?tid=129&tid=106

[BWF89]

I hope they put a TV show like that on in America...

[costoa]

From the article:

The television show, called Go_Open, has been produced with the help of the Shuttleworth Foundation ...

Where have I heard that name before? =)

I hope they allow torrents of past shows. I wish them the best of luck.

costoa

[luiska]

I see that you can buy the go_open DVD with all the episodes from them, R199 which is about €25.

Does anyone know if it is made publicly available for download, legally. Would love too see it, saw Mark in an interview on Carte Blanche (SA TV) last year. Helped my family understand my passion about Linux and OSS.

Luiska

[weekend warrior]

Here's the website (http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open/). It has an episode guide with (what looks like) complete transcripts.

[weekend warrior]

Here's an excerpt from episode 13 - about "Making money from Open source"


Marc Chase got the inside story on these local success from Mark Shuttleworth, and Alan McKinnon, Head Trainer at Afribiz.

Mark: The 1980’s and 1990’s were a great time for the software business, because it’s an extremely profitable business if you have a profitable product, right? Your cost of producing an extra CD of software is very, very low compared to the price that you can attach to that software. But I think the industry is moving away from that, and that really won’t be a sustainable business model in the future.

Mark Shuttleworth is South Africa’s best-known IT multi-millionaire, and he says he owes it all to hard work – and Open Source software. In 1999, he made headlines when he sold his company, Thawte Consulting, to American competitor Verisign for $575 million. Thawte didn’t sell software – the price paid for the company was due to their customer-base and market share.

Mark: We used software, we built all of that operation using Open Source software – the database that we used to track all of our transactions was Open Source. The Web server that we were using was Open Source. A lot of the tools to do the cryptography were initially Open Source tools that were available then and are still available today. It wasn’t a software business, and I think that’s really a sign of where the IT industry is headed. Far more of the industry is going to be focused around services than around software licensing.

Alan: It doesn’t matter how good the Operating System is, sooner or later you’re going to need somebody to come along and modify it for you, or expand it, or install new software, or make it better, or add new users.

Alan McKinnon’s company, Afribiz, has two arms: one part of the business offers support for people running Open Source software and networks, the other part is in training people to maintain systems.

Alan: You must remember, traditionally with IT, the only guys who made money out of Microsoft products, was Microsoft. They sold their products. Everybody else made money from supporting it, or giving training in it, or writing new software for it. When we set our business up, it runs like any other normal business – a student contacts us, he signs up to do a course, there’s a fee, he pays, and we train him. We’re no different from any other training institute. There’s one big difference: we only train on Open Source software.

Open Source is freely available, which means that start-up costs are much lower. For Mark, who started his business in his garage, it was indispensable.

Mark: I was a student at the time. I had no money. I was doing this to help pay for University. So I certainly couldn’t have afforded to have built all of this on proprietary software. That’s the first thing. The second thing was that proprietary software that was available just didn’t have the features. Open Source software tends to be richer in terms of what you can do with it. And easier to use in terms of plugging pieces together to create something. So what I found was that using Open Source software, I was able to set up servers on the other side of the world. I was able to build all of the infrastructure using database software that was both free-of-charge and allowed me to plug deeply into it, because the Source Code was all free. I was able to present all of this through the Web, at very low cost, because the Web server software was all freely available, and the programming languages that I used to create some of these tools, was also freely available. So, there was a huge resource out there that I could tap into, to start building this business from scratch.

The business opportunities presented by the Open Source revolution have been picked up on by the giants of IT, like IBM, Sun and HP.

Mark: HP is developing whole new products which are developed specifically for emerging markets – and those all use Open Source heavily, because it’s the only way they can both price them and compete from a functionality point of view in these emerging markets.

An example is HP’s 441, which allows 4 people to share the resources of one computer. It is built on the flexibility and power of the Open Source Operating System, Linux.

Alan: Once the big names start to support the whole Open Source way of doing things – your IBM’s and HP’s – then others will follow suit.

Mark: There are many small organizations who are finding themselves sustainable: an example is MySQL, which is a database – started as an Open Source database, became so popular (in fact, it’s now the most popular database behind websites) that they generate enough revenue from consulting and services, associated with this free software, to keep their business going.


(Then it continues onto the next page (http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open/episode_13/open_source_means_business/) with different companies >>>)

[weekend warrior]

Ooof! that looks a bit longer than I thought it would. Anyway - there's some interesting reading on that site.