It was a bright monday morning inspite of rains over the weekend.
I reached the IISc auditorium at just about 9am.

I already had my plan for the day ready. The first talk I planned to attend was Klaus Knopper's.
So once the registration was done, I marched in - and - got instantly lost :-(
Where was the Charles Babbage Hall ? I finally found it with the help of a familiar looking person.
Where had I seen him before, I wondered. As I entered the hall, it dawned on me that the person
who guided me to the hall was none other than - David Axmark, founder of MySQL !

Soon Klaus and Adriane came in and the introduction was given. Janani from LFY talked about
taking a step forward from just developing new products but enabling the society, the disabled,
the common man and making a change in the lives of many.

Klaus Knopper started his talk with 'What do you need properietary software for ?'
He said he had never worked on windows and that's why he found it very difficult to use.
So he had talked to other people to find out what made them use it.

The reasons that people cited were:
- well, everybody uses it
- xyz capability is only available in proprietary software
- the game I play, is only available as a proprietary software
- the most imporant softwares like - office, mail and browser are only proprietary (!)
- proprietary is the standard (!!)
to this Klaus said: If something is a standard, it should support all formats and all OSs
if Open Office supports all formats and OSs, then that is the standard !
- great user interface - linux has 'primitive' user interface
- Klaus demo'ed the 3D desktop and asked people if they knew of anything like that on windows
- One could turn around a window and write notes behind it - what can be more 'primitive' :-)
- ease of use - Klause of course wouldn't take that as a reason because his 'ease of use' was with linux.

He said, after he talked to people he gave some thought to it and came up with some real reasons:

Reason1 : "The Power of the Habit"
People learn a certain keyboard shortcut and want to continue to use it. They know something and want
more of what they know and more from the same software which they know best.

Reason2 : "Closed source is a threapy - a soothing effect"
Knopper said, he did not like software that told him what to do. He would rather have the software do
what he told it to do.
But most people are anxious when using software. And closed source software assumes the user is anxious,
dumb and wants help all the time. The new user says 'tell me everything', 'pre-install everything' and
closed source softwares tell them 'we will do everything for you', 'you dont have to be responsible, you
can buy responsibility'.

The promise of security and responsibility that the closed source software guys make is actually a lie.
But they can lie, because the user cannot verify their words. Open source guys on the other hand cannot lie because everything is in the open. They honestly tell people 'well, you will need to take care of yourself'. Anxious new users dont appreciate this honesty.

Reason 3: Every closed source user is equally ignorant
Since everybody is trying to find things out of the same black box, they all share their findings about usage problems, with each other. Eg. x problem gets solved by making this registry entry.
Open source users are of all kinds - those who know the code well, those who dont. So new users and
non-programmers get this feeling that they dont know enough and may fear to ask at times.

The talk concluded with questions, as usual, where people asked him about the new release of knoppix and
about availability of commercial support for open source software etc.

This thought about 'support' remained in my mind and I thought of sharing my views with Klaus over tea.
We had a long chat over tea and sandwiches about this 'support' issue and many other interesting stuff.
Will post about it soon....