Is different too scary for small business?

I was at a meeting yesterday - and I came up with an analogy about how Open Source presents a different model of competition to the market. Open source software, and open standards lets everyone compete on the same terms and lowers the barriers to entry for new players. Literally anyone can take the same tools and innovate in the way they deliver results for their customers.

Edit: This event has been rescheduled to June 10!!

 Tomorrow morning I'm doing a talk at the K12 Open Minds Conference in Indianapolis.

Grab a copy of the slides: OpenRoad.pdf, view the video - and follow these links to some of the references.

Am just refreshing my references and arguments for open source for education and small business. Stumbled across this paper entitled " Open Access, Open Archives And Open Source in Higher Education"  delivered at the State Library Of New South Wales, in Sydney in 2005 as part of the National Scholarly Communications Forum by Professor John M. Unsworth, of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, USA.