Educating about CopyLeft to Reduce Resistance to Change in Migrations to FLOSS
By Italo Vignoli

One of the main issues to solve when migrating from proprietary software to FLOSS is end user resistance to change, mostly based on misconceptions or sheer ignorance about FLOSS. Educating about CopyLeft licenses, and all the associated advantages, can reduce this resistance to change, and ease the migration process. The Document Foundation's Migration Protocol, focused on migrations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, suggests to spend the first training session on FLOSS basics: the four freedoms, the license, the community of developers and their organization, the way security and quality are managed, and so on. At the end of the session, most people understand why these FLOSS basics represent an advantage for the organization, and tend to reduce their resistance to change to a reasonable level.