Share the software. Sell services. Workshops, installations, consultations, support. Use money from sale of services to continue service. Repeat. Get some charismatic people to go door to door, splash around some booze and joy with top decision makers at large institutions. With friends in high places, suddenly there's no shortage of clients wanting to run free software and pay for your services.
It also takes the piss right out of proprietary software's only competitive selling point: being able to call someone to fix your broken software for you.
My point is that I think the mountain of changes / features required is pretty high if you're cobbling free software together to create something someone at a school will buy, before you can even make a sale.
I'm also not sure schools or non tech focused businesses really think THAT much about just calling some rando to fix their software. That's a whole other process that isn't easy / sure to do the thing you want.
> cobbling free software together to create something someone at a school will buy
IDK what you’re talking about, 30% of higher education already runs Canvas (and it claims to be the fastest growing LMS) as one example (and it’s competing with Free software like Moodle).
In fact the exact opposite seems to be the case: I see teachers cobbling together proprietary Zoom with Nearpod to get a fraction of the features offered by the simple, cohesive built-for-education solution offered by BigBlueButton, and laboriously copying Zoom links into Google Classroom (which only wants to promote Google Meet), when Canvas ships with native BigBlueButton integration.
I dont understand what youre saying. An organization like the fsf or debian clearly has the resources to do outreach and supplant microsoft. There is already massive demand in countries outside the united states to replace microsoft.
It's very simple and doable. I just don't have time right now. Busy doing other things. But if I had nothing else on the radar, I would totally try to run that game.
