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Nonprofits using Linux? (fwd)



----- Forwarded message from Anders Schneiderman <SCHNEIDA@seiu.org> -----

Seeking Participants for Linux in Nonprofits Study 

The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) is developing case studies
of nonprofit organizations that use Linux for their office network. We
are looking for organizations with staffs of 15 people or more. If you
work or volunteer for a nonprofit of that size, that uses Linux for
networking (including file/print sharing, or as an email server), we
are interested in interviewing you about your experience. 

The idea behind the study is to convince more nonprofits to take a
serious look at Linux. While many schools and government agencies are
beginning to consider Linux as an option, awareness in the rest of the
nonprofit sector, especially small-to-medium size organizations,
remains very low. Given that these groups have very tight budgets and
share the volunteer ethic of Open Source, you would think that Linux
would be widespread among them. But so far nonprofits have been
surprisingly reluctant to embrace Open Source. When it comes to
technology, nonprofits tend to trail several years behind the
for-profit world. Although many nonprofits use Apache, PHP, etc. for
Web work, most treat the idea of Open Source in general and Linux in 
particular the same way businesses did several years ago. The fact
that Open Source is now mainstream in the business world hasn't had
much impact on the way nonprofits see it. 

By doing this study, we hope to show nonprofits that other
organizations just like theirs have used Linux to cut their total IT
costs (including training and support) and to create networks they can
really count on. We also hope to give them a better understanding of
what it means to run Linux vs. Microsoft/Novell networks as well as
the issues they need to think about and the pitfalls that they will
want to avoid if they moved to Open Source on the back end. 

If you think your organization would make a good case study, please
fill out the survey that's available on the study's web page at
http://www.nosi.net/tco.shtml. For more information on NOSI, please
check out our web site at www.nosi.net. 

Thanks, 
Reuben Silvers 
Anders Schneiderman 
The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative 
www.nosi.net

----- End forwarded message -----

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