Linked by Henrik Nilsen Omma on Tue 9th Mar 2004 05:48 UTC
You, the reader, are hereby invited to participate in a celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on August 28th this year. On that day we will stage public events to inform the general public about the virtues of FOSS. We invite you to form local teams and set up tables in town centers, shopping malls, or wherever there are likely to be lots of people on a Saturday.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
"1 Because acronyms scare non technical people away and plus it's boring just reading them."
Hmm. The latter is an opinion i don't agree with. It matters not, imo.
The former makes me wondering. What do you think XP and MacOSX are? Those are both acronyms.
"2 Because talking about MS doesn't do any favors, instead try to focus on the merits of what you have to offer."
MS (a boring acronym too?) is related with politics; see my answer at #5. MS's Gates was the one who proposed proprietary software back in the beginning of the 80's. No wonder he is seen as the enemy? MS markets against Linux, and possibly fundss SCO FUD campaign. Should "we" just ignore that, while they chose finally officially not to ignore "us"? Can't "talking about MS" and "focussing on the merits we have to offer" co-exist? Perhaps you can explain your point futher.
"3 The same reason why people avoid hare krishnas at airport: they look weird!"
Most of the time you don't see the developers.
"4 Do really need proof that there is hardly any women contributing to open source projects and yesterday was the international womens day"
Rather a statistic, a reason why it is important to raise the number, a reason why positive discrimination is okay (or, is, in this case).
''international womens day'' isn't an argument. I can easily use that to make my point regarding positive discrimination: "If women wish to decide and choice for themselves without receiving a special threat, thus being threated equal to men, then why should we on base of gender attract women more than men in the FLOSS community?"
"5 Because software isn't about politics, it's about just that: software!"
Politics is related to software. You don't have to look far. Take patents, copyright, SCO FUD as examples; would you claim those are not connected with politics?
Really, if you're not much concerned about poilitics i suggest '''joining'''* the "open source" or "OpenBSD" camp instead. The Free Software movement, part of the FLOSS/FOSS movement as a whole, IS partly about politics.
* Take that word with a grain of salt, it's figuraly meant.