No costly waiting, and a quick answer
Have you already called a ``hot line''? Have you already had to wait for ten or twenty minutes, blocking your phone line and yourself during this time? Pretending to entertain you, the line imposes you some noise and a useless repeating message. And generally this waiting time is charged a prohibitive cost.
When you'll call me, the chance that you find me immediately are thin, but you'll be able to leave me a message, telling me when and where to call you back. When I'll do that, we'll fix your problem together, quickly, without any additional cost, and without any waiting.
A competent contact
One of the most offensive features of the ``hot line'' system, independently of the expensive waiting, is that once you finally obtain some contact, they happen to be rather incompetent. Too often, they are reading stereotype answers to anticipated questions, and they cannot deviate from this way. Unless your case is extremely simple, you are loosing your time and money.
When you'll call me, your contact will be competent, and able to immediately adapt to your own problem. I'll ask you the right quesstions, in an understandable way. I'll guide and advise you in a useful manner. I'll adapt to your personal case, since I'll know it. You'll not be dealing with somebody unknown.
Advantages of free software
Software is the immaterial part of your computer, the set of programs necessary for its working. The operating system is the main software part. It manages all the computer resources, and provides you with a graphical interface. Through this interface, you dialog with the computer. The browser is also a software, as well as the text processor, or the programs that allow you to process and handle photographs or videos.
Many software products are commercial, proprietary products. They are built and sold by a view large software shops, some of them being among the most powerful and wealthy companies in the world. The software products I'll install onto your computer will not be proprietary, they will be free software. This means that they are built by large communities of specialized programmers, and distributed for free to anybody interested.
One of the main characteristics of free software is that the source text can be looked at by anybody, and changed if needed. Source text if the program as written by the programmers. It must be translated to computer language, and proprietary applications are distributed only in this latter form. This prevents users to understand how they are written, to find their defects and to fix them. This also prevents the users to adapt the programs to other computers or operating systems, or to delete usage obstacles which are placed only to excuse the larger cost charged for a version without these obstacles.
Free of charge
Any free software product can be copied and distributed free of charge. Its usage license states this explicitly. Better, this license forbids to deny this fundamental right to anybody whom you give a copy, necessarily licit, of this product.
As a consequence, the software products running on your computer will always be free of charge. The only cost is the software installation and its update operations, i.e. my personal work if you ask me to do it. When you know that the most ubiquitous operating system costs from 100 to 600 euros, depending on the version, that the most widespread office suite costs almost 800 euros, and that the most common image editing software product costs up to 2,300 euros, you can imagine the tremendous savings you make when choosing free software.
More safety
Even if very well designed, a software product can contain parts which lead to negative consequences in terms of usage safety. This can be a simple program failure, when the program terminates brutally, maybe with a more or less understandable error message, and losing all the work you just did. This can also be something more severe, which allows anonymous and rogue individuals to connect to your computer from the outside world. They are then able to look at your personal files, destroy or change them. They can make your computer unusable or terribly slow. They can use your computer as a starting base for compromising other computers.
If such a security breach is discovered on proprietary software, you must wait until the vendor is informed of the problem, then until programmers working for this vendor find the initial cause of the problem and determine a repair procedure, then until the vendor informs its customers of the updates necessary for fixing the problem. During the period that spans between the problem discovery and the distribution of updates, your computer is open to external attacks.
In the case of free software, it is not one or two programmers who start working on a solution, but the whole user community, including those who found the problem. A fix is generally available in less than half a day, often less. The corresponding update can be done immediately. I'll make it as soon as available, if I'm in charge of maintaining your computer software.
More evolutivity
Because of reasons already mentioned, free software generally changes much faster than proprietary software. In fact, the various contributors work in a spirit of emulation, trying to provide new functionalities, a more pleasant presentation, a more usable documentation.
Thus you'll always use software tools among the best available, and taking advantage very quickly of new ideas. If new versions provide obvious advantages in your case, I'll make them available to you immediately.
The GNU/Linux system
The operating system I'll install onto your computer is GNU/Linux, the only one that is free software, with all the inherent advantages. Moreover, this system provides you with advantages not found with other operating systems:
- Several different users, with a protection and permission system which provides fine control upon what is shared and what is private.
- Easy sharing of information between several separate computers.
- Possibility of distant connection. This will be way for me to maintain your computer from my home, without disturbing you.
- Very important emphasis placed on usage security.