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I'd go with the benefits that being open has - Are you, as a customer, more likely to trust a product where you can get the inner workings and "trade secrets" (so to speak), even if you don't understand them? Imagine if food products didn't list ingredients, for example. How many people really know what pyridoxine hydrochloride really is anyway... Also mention that since it's open, other people who *do* understand how it works are also able to pick up on bugs - it puts the whole thing under the microscope and allows for higher quality software.



I'd avoid putting down proprietary software. A lot of people dislike (psychologically) others stating that things they use suck, or, showing those things in a negative light. It internally registers as attacking one's personal choices at a sub-conscious level.



Good section, and I think I covered performance up above...



Hardly. Linux is not user-unfriendly. This myth was debunked a long long time ago (in a galaxy not so far away, too). Linux is no less or more user-friendly than Windows, however both are trailing (very slightly) behind Apple. The reason that people make this assumption is that they don't realize what's going on.

How many people have used Windows before trying Linux? Quite a number. Most, in fact. I'd even go so far as to say the vast majority. Windows and Linux are DIFFERENT, that's for sure. Doing something in Windows doesn't always work in Linux, and, vice versa. But people are creatures of habit. They hang on to their "Well this is the way I've always done it" attitude, and thus, declare that Linux isn't as user-friendly as Windows is, for the simple fact that Linux doesn't try to emulate Windows. Ironically, the people who switch to MacOS after using Windows have the same problem at first - they have to relearn how to walk in their new OS before they feel comfortable with it. Linux isn't any different. Studies have proven that Linux's latest UIs are no harder to use (in some studies, they're even slightly easier) for new users who have never used a computer over that of Windows XP and Vista.

Also, comparing Gimp to Photoshop just isn't appropriate. First off, Photoshop is a Mac program ported to Windows, and second, it's been around for many, many years. I was using 4.0 back in 1997. 2.0 was around a couple years before then, even. Adobe has a ton of R&D into the program which is why it is so fully featured. Additionally, since it's been around for many many years, a lot of 3rd party companies have made plug-ins for Photoshop - the customer base is there. Gimp, on the other hand, has a different UI (it looks the same, but the menuing is totally different) but that doesn't make it an inferior product by ANY means. What does is the fact that they're playing catch-up to 12 years of Adobe funding, Adobe innovation, and 3rd party plugins. Even JASC Paint Shop Pro is older than Gimp, and they are binary compatible with a lot of PS plugins. Honestly it's a bit like comparing a 18th century rifle to a Cruise missile.

Actually, I left those out intentionally.

POSIX is wonderful, POSIX is nice, but the average user and/or business doesn't care. Learned this the hard way, I did sad People are likely to lose interest on a level as deep as this. Unless it's a technical paper addressing windows professionals or programmers or similar, I'd avoid something like this - your average high school class and most business users just won't care.

Similar argument against power. Yes, linux runs well on pre-Pentium PCs. Who has one these days? Not many. Those that do fall into 1 of 3 categories. Either: 1) They are a geek who have old hardware laying around. Few and far between. If this is the target audience, great. But probably this won't apply to anybody in the audience. 2) They're too cheap to upgrade their primary computer. This means they run some ancient version of windows on it, and do so because it works. I doubt they'd be interested in switching OSes - if they cared enough to do that, they'd probably have a more modern PC. Or, 3) They have an older PC laying around from the last time they upgraded, and, don't know what to do with it. This is the most likely of the 3 scenarios, but it still is very remote. Maybe 1 out of 100 people in your audience of "random people". Again, if this is your target audience, go for it, but if it isn't, I'd avoid mention (or do it ever so briefly).

As for development, I touched on this lightly...


I'd avoid going too deep on the development cycle. For a general paper, I'd suggest keeping it informative but general. Doing tangents like these may be a great idea if your target audience can handle them. If they can't, though, it will turn them off to the whole idea. Linux is more about freedom than anything else, technically, but adopting linux is more about psychology - most of the internet generation doesn't care what they run, so long as it works for them with little hassle and fits into their "I want it now" life style.

The average user/business might not care that it is POSIX itself, but that the program will run on Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, etc. easily and in the same manner. On the other hand, the difference in just the menus on Photoshop between Mac and Win32 is astounding, considering that it is the same program, just with a different API. I can run The Gimp on all POSIX platforms without source modification, so everything acts the same. Also, the average user does care that they can use any one of twelve word processors because they save to the same format, they get to choose whichever one they like best.

1. The paper is about "free software," not Linux; This includes things like Firefox (which I forgot to mention previously), which many people have probably heard about, and also things like The Gimp and OpenOffice.org, not just Linux;

2. I live and breathe the command-line; According to the Real UNIX Specification, anything that preforms a useful function graphically should be a frontend to a commandline tool; This is because useful programs tend to preform complicated functions and all things UNIX should "do one thing and do it well;"

3. Embellishing on point 2, all that would have to be rewritten is the UI to port to OS X; The underlying functionality would be the same and ideally interact with the UI the same way between updates, so I could recompile the new version on the Mac;