tola

I think that the key to making people comfortable with changes in the software they use has a lot to do with familiarity. If you put someone in front of the most user friendly operating system in the world but they're used to something else, they will find it difficult to operate. People get surprisingly attached to ways of doing things, and can feel quite uncomfortable with the idea that they no longer need to press the "Start" button to turn off their computer for example. When I first used an Apple Macintosh computer it took me five minutes to figure out how to open the CD-ROM drive because the eject button just wasn't where I expected it to be. It wasn't that the button was in a counter-intuitive place, it was in fact on the keyboard with all the other controls. My problem was that I was just used to the eject button being next to the CD tray.

Usability studies show that people usually don't use software in the way in which it is designed to be used. I've never met anyone who upon installing a new piece of software reads through all the documentation thoroughly before launching into their shiny new application. Be it through lack of time or simply lack of interest, most people just fumble through and as long as they can achieve the tasks they need to they don't really mind whether they're doing it the way the programmer intended. And why should they?

This method of using software seems to work pretty well for a lot of people a lot of the time, but where it falls down is that people build misconceptions and bad habits. While they can achieve what they need to, they can come to lack an understanding of the underlying technology behind what they're doing. This means that even the slightest change in the user interface can cripple their productivity until they figure out the "new way" of achieving the same task.

So what's all this got to do with Free and Open Source Software? Joe Public the average computer user is not particularly keen on change. Once he's figured out a way to do something he doesn't really want to re-learn how to achieve the same thing in a different way. This is why he is often willing to pay a premium to hang onto the the old way of doing things, even if the alternative is better.

If you want to try out Free Software for the first time or you want to introduce it to a friend, you don't have to be brave and wipe your hard disk to install a whole new operating system. There are lots of ways of dipping your toe into the sea of Free Software without ending up feeling like you're drowning. For someone who has never used a personal computer that wasn't running a copy of Microsoft Windows, a GNU/Linux desktop can seem a bewildering and alien world and they can be put off for life. Perhaps a better approach is a gradual migration rather than a straight switch to a whole new system.

A great place to start is the Mozilla Firefox Browser (www.mozilla.org). Whilst technically still in beta, you will find that this stand alone web browser from the Mozilla Foundation is much more stable and less bloated than the more commonly used Microsoft Internet Explorer. It also boasts features like popup blocking and tabbed browsing which once tried you'll never want to live without. The best thing about Firefox is that it will run in Windows, Mac or Linux so you can try it on the operating system you already use and if you come to switch to a Linux desktop at a later date, you'll feel right at home.

If you get on well with Firefox you might want to try out Thunderbird, also a Mozilla project. Thunderbird is a mail and news client like Outlook Express and has built in spam filtering and a spell checker. There are also other Mozilla projects to try out like Chatzilla, an IRC client and Sunbird, a Calendar application.

Perhaps the obvious next suite of applications to try is Open Office (www.openoffice.org), a free and surprisingly fully featured alternative to Microsoft Office or Lotus Smartsuite. Open Office has native versions for Windows and Linux and can be pursuaded to run in Mac if you want to have a play. The developers of Open Office have done their best to make it compatible with proprietary document formats so you can still use all your old Microsoft Word documents and you can also save documents in PDF format to distribute to other people.

All of the above Free Software projects encourage open standards, can be obtained free of charge over the Internet and come under an Open Source license of some description. So give Free Software a try, you have nothing to lose.

Ben Francis