I’ve dabbled with The GNU Project for about 6 years now not really grasping it’s potential power for many industries including our own – negotiating.  There is a fantastic documentary,  Revolution OS, that really gives a thinking person a chance to understand how some greedy players at the dawn personal computing created a spin so powerful that it’s impacted all of our lives for decades on a massive scale and most of us just thought “that is just the way it is”.

For me, ironically – I give credit to Bill Gates for my unexpected education in Open Source.  64 bit computers showed up in about 2003.  I bought and built my first 64 bit PC in 2004.  Like the average “sheepeople” I sleepwalked to my PC to go download a copy of the latest 64 bit Windows Operating System …only to discover it didn’t exist.  For you non-techies my (then) 64 bit pc was the relative equivalent of trading in my Moped for a Jaguar.  Billyboy at MS did eek out a 64-bit version of XP in 2005 but it was unsupported – no one was making any drivers for your video and audio and perhaps even your internnet connection.  It wasn’t until the dreaded Vista that there was an actual MS 64bit OS (2007).

The 32-bit computers came out in 1985 so from that time until the bloated MS Corp finally sold us a “bad” 64 bit OS – we had waited 22 years.  So, I got my fancy new computer home, built it and discovered there was no “sheepeople” OS for me to install in 2004.  That’s when I began to look at Linux.  I consider myself a “super-user” (fancy term that means I’ll try anything on a computer at least once)and in 2004 I was rather intimidated by Linux.  I assumed my geek-factor wasn’t high enough or something.  Since then I’ve realized that it wasn’t that I was too dumb to do Linux but that I had been very well trained by Microsoft on how to think about computers and computing – I had to unlearn some of my assumptions and “understanding” the MS way in order to appreciate a much broader view of the world of connected computers.

I’ve been using the very impressive Ubuntu Distro (if you don’t understand the term distro here that is just one example of how MS has limited  your thinking about computing – it took me months to “get it”)for business and personal use since 2008.  I live in the home-town of Dell and I believe they are carting some of their computers to market with Ubuntu as well.  My wife who gets cranky at a computer for the smallest of infractions migrated from XP to Ubuntu earlier this year.

I titled this post “Open Source has Arrived” as if me discovering it made it so, but that’s not true.  Open Source has been around for decades.  It is the story about how Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo want to sue Google for providing the world with an open source solution in regards to out-of-date books that has inspired the title.  Google will be releasing a free operating system next year and appears to be joining the community of the Open Source world in some ways.  The other three named corps are crying foul because they can’t “compete” with free.  My current Negotiating Position on that is as follows: You Three big greedy corporations please step back so that the other 6+ billion of us on the planet can find some benefit in the great transformation that Google is making toward Open Source.  You CANNOT compete with Open Source because it’s principle is freedom like free speech, not lawsuits, greed and monopolies.  If your Operating System costs $400 and theirs cost $0 then that like all the other qualities of the operating system are for the consumer to decide and use or buy.  Your closed source community is not unlike long-distance phone service.  I’m sure those of us who are old enough remember a time when you had to pay for long-distance.  Perhaps we will be around to look back on a time when you had to purchase an operating system.

Afterthought: As a Negotiator I do not revile anyone making a profit.  To be a little open-sourcy about it – I also do not object to everyone making a profit.  When you ponder my passionate position on Open Source from my above blather, ask yourself this question – who determines what you can make a profit on and what you cant?  If you could do something about that to change that situation would you?  I’ve been pondering what an Open Source Negotiation might look like.

If you would like some Open Source Negotiating Training or just an Open Source Negotiating Dialog please contact me at justask@yourownbestgood.com.

I’ll see you at the Negotiating Table!

Bruce, The Negotiator!