| Follow @ncbaratta
Austin, TX
Nicole C. Baratta (Engard) is a Senior Content Strategist at Red Hat. She received her MLIS from Drexel University and her BA from Juniata College. Nicole volunteers as the Director of ChickTech Austin. Nicole is known for many different publications including her books “Library Mashups", "More Library Mashups", and "Practical Open Source Software for Libraries". Nicole can be reached at ncbaratta@gmail.com.
Authored Comments
Ted,
Great advice. I do talk about vendor history and things like mergers and acquisitions causing you to have to switch systems or go without support and that does seem to resonate with people.
Nicole
Obviously we're not going to agree on this point, but for the other readers I"d like to explain a bit further.
The word "free" in front of software conjures an image of $0 in people's minds in libraries (and many businesses). It makes it so that no one listens to freedoms associated with the software. In fact I was asked to teach a class on free software for libraries and the invitation said "things like Google Docs and Facebook" ... so "Open Source" allows us to explain that the software comes with freedoms and has nothing to do with the cost of the software.
That said, I do explain the two different definitions both "open source" and "free software" in the talks I do.