I won't expand too much on this - it's been done before, and usually opens a can of worms (and more usually a very long convoluted forum thread). Essentially it's a physical disc that people can use and share with whomever they like, independent of computer literacy. Consider sharing a website with somebody; you'd either paste them a link or write it on a piece of paper. How does that compare with giving somebody a disc of software, especially if they aren't somebody who would normally hunt down software on their own?
The main problem with your argument is the use of "you" in "...you don't have to download hundreds of megabytes at a time (disk image), you download only the software you want.". You're making a large assumption that users both know about OSS and can actively seek out programs that they are interested in. If you picked a person on the street and asked them what the difference between open source software, freeware and shareware was, what would be the chances of a correct answer? Google for any popular open source program, and see how many "sponsored" and "Free Trial" editions of that pop up. We take the confusion out of it for users who might get lost amongst that or badly supported freeware and (worse still) crippled trial-ware.
A lot of the non-tech people who contact us after receiving a copy of the disc remark that they had no idea that OSS existed, let alone that there was such a wide variety of quality applications.
In short OpenDisc is basically the bridge between day-to-day Windows users and open source software. For all the links you can send people, I really don't think you can equal the presence of a disc they can pop into a computer.
And quickly:
- What you mentioned about grabbing only the software you needed is quite true (we encourage it directly for users willing and capable to do so) and the Programs listing we have gets a considerable amount of traffic. Like I said above, a lot of users aren't aware of OSS, might not have even heard of Firefox or OOo, and typically those users don't think to visit our site out of the blue and download individual programs. What we found back with TheOpenCD is that most Windows users don't find us online, don't search out for OSS, but are given a disc. It looks like continuing; we have a disproportionate amount of Linux visitors - some 65% of all traffic. Yet only 15% of Linux users visit my blog, and it's hardly technical.
- Personally I've never been annoyed at out of date software on magazine cover discs, but I assume it's a personal thing. OpenDisc will release every two months at least yet I'm sure they'll be times when a new Firefox or OOo will be out in-between releases. How much that matters is hard to quantify.
In the first four days that 07.10 has been released, we've had a little over 2600 people download the ISO, and yesterday alone the Programs listing got 3173 hits. Both are great figures as far as I'm concerned; my stats show the Programs listing leads a good percentage of those to view other OSS sites. More importantly, think of the people downloading the ISO - how many would you think would only be downloading almost 600MB for themselves? How many would be redistributing it amongst their friends, work-mates, schools, etc?
As much as I'd like to debate this, I really don't have the time available to enter into this any further.
