This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive.

This 8:09 segment features Cathy Malmrose talking about how her family moved to Ubuntu GNU-Linux. Her story is particularly interesting because Cathy and her husband, Earl Malmrose, founded Zareason.com, which is the third-largest distributor of Linux-powered computers in North America. The Malmrose family is deeply involved in San Francisco Bay Area GNU-Linux events, and they sell a lot of computers to people in Northern California. The Malmrose family also supplied the new computers that power the Ubuntu GNU-Linux lab in the DTP's mystery school in San Francisco, and their oldest son, Vincent Malmrose, has helped rebuild that school's Ubuntu lab as part of his community service leadership training for his Boy Scout Eagle badge. So the Malmrose family has their fingerprints all over the DTP film.

Cathy is a very engaging story teller. This story makes clear that her family members are not Linux religious zealots; in fact, when Cathy and Earl first looked at using Linux several years before this footage was shot, they concluded that it would not be worth using, because it was too rough. They thought it required too much maintenance. Using it would cut into their family time, and they had recently decided to cut back on their cars and other stuff, because they felt that they were spending too much time on material things, and not enough with each other. Linux was too hard to maintain, even for Earl Malmrose, who is a programmer by trade, and so they didn't want to load up Earl with yet more computer maintenance jobs when he could be spending time with the family.

Several years passed, and their son Kory started experimenting with GNU-Linux again. One day, he set up an elaborate program called Compiz on the family's computer. Kory's mom, Cathy, had not heard of this new program. His mom walked past the computer, and saw the windows appearing to melt on the computer screen. Thinking that she was looking at a Microsoft Windows computer, she became alarmed. She asked Kory what was wrong. Kory said that their Microsoft Windows computer had gotten a virus. Cathy believed him at first. When Kory revealed that it was a joke, Cathy's mood switched from alarm to intrigue. She was impressed that a free computer software program could be so beautiful. That was the time when she started to think that maybe GNU-Linux had matured enough to be useful for everyday purposes for their busy family of six.

And then it flipped. Linux became low-maintenance for the family, and Windows was the time drain. That's why they switched. Plus, the eye candy was nice.

The segment starts out with Cathy playing with her two youngest children, Jake and Anna, who are tossing around stuffed plush Tux the Penguin toys brought to the Lindependence 2008 event by Lindependence organizer Stephen Rufle.

This video is our rough edited "source code". It is intended as an index for the DTP crew, and a way for us to communicate. It lacks music, transitions, and special effects. It is raw, rough-edited video. We hope it will also be useful for someone else in some way.

If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeld@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_534

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 001, How the Malmrose family moved to GNU-Linux
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

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