Mega-Geek March?

hammerm writes " According to an article on infoworld.com, 'A group of open source and free software developers is planning to lead a march on San Francisco's City Hall next week in an effort to promote the use of freely available software by California's government offices,' and it goes on to say 'it aims to bring attention to proposed legislation that would require California's government offices to use software with freely available source code rather than products from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft Corp.'"

Comments

This could be a trap...

[LordZardoz]

Perhaps the motive is just to get a bunch of lazy programmers out from in front of their computers and walking around for exercise?

END COMMUNICATION

Geek March As Art

[marko123]

We could represent our method of writing software by walking just like Microsoft would, but more jerkily and occasionally falling over.

Alternatively, we can march in two different directions, to simulate KDE and GNOME. Then the walkers in each direction can break into two directions, one for Free Software, and one for Open Source. Eventually, we will all be outside the city, separated, unable to hear each other, and blaming Microsoft for the situation :)

push for open DATA FORMATS, not open SOURCE

[AdamBa]

I fearlessly predict this measure won't work, since the proprietary software companies are the ones with the money.

The real point should be open DATA FORMATS...the government should be able to know the format of all the data that it is storing on behalf of the people of the state. I 100% agree that government procurement is a great way to enforce this kind of thing, but they should be pushing for something else. Open source, closed source, whatever...just make the data formats available.

- adam

Re:How many will show up?

[merc_sa]

here's a better idea.. start a foundation and instead of wasting money on the inevitable stupid looking costumes, each geek contributes $10. Next, select a politician target to defeat, preferably one of the DMCA proponent idiots. Take a pool of collected cash and give it to the opponent of the targetted politician and vote for the opponent come this midterm election. Given this is a midterm election, turn out will be light. After tossing out the targetted politician, put another politician in the crosshair. All we need is that first unemployed politician to make them take notice.

a march just convince the rest of the population that geeks are a bunch of weirdos and must avoid eye contact at every opportunity.