One of the facets of my life that I’ve written very little about is my business, DGW Enterprises. I’ve been in a couple of businesses in the last 14 years. In both of these businesses I’ve had the opportunity to practice spiritual principles. One of those principles is thinking of other people first. The world of technology and computers to be more specific has become increasingly complex. A close personal friend and I began a partnership in 1992. Our goal was to provide affordable technology solutions to small businesses and individuals in our immediate geographic area. At that time many of the established businesses were sticking it to consumers and we sought to change that by finding affordable solutions and providing them at aggressive pricing for our customers. We were able to do that for a number of years until outfits like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and vendors like Tiger-Direct were eating our lunch. I was blessed to have a partner who like myself was more interested in doing a job well than in making tons of money. We helped a lot of local businesses, private individuals and non-profits. Our partnership ended but not our friendship.
About four or five years ago I decided to “re-invent myself” and to provide a web design and programming business. Since many people continued to come to me for advice on hardware and software I also decided to become a consultant in those areas. During that period of time I began to use Linux. I started with Red Hat, moved to Mandrake, then back to Red Hat, then Fedora and Ubuntu. In the course of all this I experimented with dozens of open source software applications. I began to see and to believe that I could save businesses, non-profits and individuals time and money using open source software and Linux in particular. It’s been a lot of fun to share my passion for open source with my growing and evolving customer base. At first most people just can’t believe that an operating system that is free can be any good. Many can’t believe that software like OpenOffice and Firefox are free and that major corporations are using them.
In the last ten years of my life I’ve done a lot of consulting for ministries. Most ministries don’t have tons of money yet by the same token most of them have websites and have grown to require email. Most ministries can’t afford to buy office productivity solutions retailing in the $350-$400 range. Open Source software has been a boon to folks like this and in many ways I think of the open source community as being similar to the Book of Acts where the new converts to Christianity shared what they had with the community. Penguin in the Pew by Donald Parris is a great book available in PDF format that helps to explain the advantages of open source software to non-profits.
Today I worked with three of my customers. Each customer had unique needs and in each case I was able to help them. Being of service to others is my goal and seeing customers faces light up when I solve their problem is a blessing in itself. My last customer of the day was a gentleman who had twice before been victimized by spyware infestations on a Windows 98 machine. A couple of weeks ago I loaned him a computer that I had in stock. The computer is a Celeron 1.1 ghz machine with 512 mb RAM. I loaded it with Centos Linux configured it’s modem and my neighbor/customer has been reading email and enjoying the internet without the menace of spyware and viruses. Today I installed a Hewlett-Packard inkjet for him and he’s very happy that everything works.
If you’re an individual who’s gotten tired of fighting viruses and or spyware then maybe your computer should be running Linux. There are some good books and lots of websites to help you over the learning curve.
All about Linux
Fedora for Dummies
Ubuntu-Linux for human beings
Happy and safe surfing. Peace.