Draft Summary For Presentations Leveraging Commercial Advantage From Free Software Projects - Venture Capitalists no longer are funding Startups with high burn rates. Startups must convince VCs they are not wasting VC money. At 2nd & 3rd round private refinancing & Initial Public Offering investors must remain convinced investment money is well spent. - Purchasing most commercial software is now money wasted ! Why ? - Linux & FreeBSD now provide free complete software systems, with over five thousand mostly free packages ! Purchasing commercialy similar products has become an un-necessary capital expenditure. - VCs who discover Startups that have ignored the advantages of free sourced software, should question what other commercial factors have been ignored. - Companies that just use Linux or FreeBSD internally save their own software licence fees, but only companies that ensure their suppliers & customers can also benefit from free software enable more software money to remain in the pockets of their suppliers & customers ... a negotiating advantage ! - It's Still A Secret ! - Free software has no advertising budget to pay for adverts & puff pieces in trade magazines. Why would magazines want their advertisers (EG Microsoft etc) to lose your software purchasing budget ? - Who uses Free Software ? Yahoo & many others, but some are reluctant to admit it: ... why allow competitors sight of a competitive advantage ? - Free Software, like Free Sex, Is A Rare Exception To Common Truisms:- - "You only get what you pay for" Not true ! - Some of us give software away free ! Some of the best is free ! EG Gcc, Emacs, the IP stack in routers etc. - "Commercial is better than Free" Not true! - Some professional programmers put more enthusiasm into their elective free project, than their commercial job ! - "You'll catch a virus if you screw around [downloading off the net] !" Sure, especially if your proprietary commercial operating system has as little protection as the favourite commercial operating system; But if you use just verified sources & binaries from trusted public domain source code projects EG FreeBSD & Linux, you will be safer than with many commercial binaries. - So What Free Software Is Available ? The entire base Systems plus Archivers, Astro, Audio, Benchmarks, Biology, Cad, Comms, Converters, Databases, Deskutils, Development, Editors, Emulators, Ftp, Games, Graphics, Irc, Java, Language Compilers, Mail, Math, Mbone, Misc, Net, News, Palmtop, Print (& WP etc), Security, Shells, Sysutils, Textproc, Web, X-Windows, even SCO, Linux & MS-Windows emulators etc. - You can even avoid commercial operating system license fees, but still purchase commercial packages if you want, EG: Word Perfect, Starwriter, Netscape, ApplixWare, Oracle etc. - Consultancies exist to supplement support for free software. FreeBSD & Linux projects maintain world wide lists. - For more info, web references etc, see: http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/free/ ================== Speaker: Julian H. Stacey is a Computer Systems Engineer & Internet Consultant, profesionaly & personaly engaged in the Free Software arena. Language: The presentation, questions & answers are all available in English or German. The speaker understands a little French too, but not to speak.