Slashdot Mirror
LWCE Wrapup
Okay, let's close out the Linuxworld Expo news as best we can. CNet has an article on the march on City Hall (there's also an AP article) to promote open source in government (some people even want to get Linux certified). CNN loves Linux. Bruce Perens, as we mentioned last night, is bailing out of Hewlett-Packard. And Newsforge has several stories from the Linuxworld floor: 1, 2, 3, 4. And finally, CmdrTaco and Chris Dibona (Gamara here on Slashdot) were on TechTV yesterday (and repeats today). Viewer discretion advised.
I know and you know that it would be completly impossible for government to go open source only, atleast for now. We need to do this is baby steps. What we should be preaching is open formats, then we can work on open source. Government has a responcibility that its public records can be read by anyone. And that its private records can be read at a later date. Push open formats, thats what government really needs. Nothing illogical about its requirement, and it will open to door to competition and open source in government IT purchases.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
They were showing (primarily) Services for Unix 3.01. Not a big deal, all legitimate. The booth was relatively small (maybe 15-20 feet across and only 10 feet deep) The booth was busy and nobody egged the presenters or forcibly tattooed Tux on their foreheads, as much as we all may have enjoyed that.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
Quote:
But open-source guru Bruce Perens, who marched alongside Tiemann, lamented that most technologists simply aren't paying attention. "It's obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem," he said. "Either they don't understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn't allow them to talk about it."
I live in San Francisco and knew nothing of this march. My friends attending LWCE didn't know about this march. "Expected turn out of 20 to a 100" is bollocks. They didn't announce this in advance, or they'd had more participation. I could have gathered at leat 10 people to go with me. Yesterday I was working on a project *downtown*, so a stroll to city hall was very doable *if* we knew about it.
Sheesh...
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Anybody knows where can I find pictures of this expo? There's nothing on the site. I'm particularly curious to see Microsoft's booth...
Quote from the article on the two dozen saddoes saunter...
At one point, marchers came across a historical plaque that was sponsored by Microsoft. They groaned and quickly papered over the software giant's name with a bumper sticker
Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...
"Information wants to be paid"
Linuxworld seemed like two conferences in one. There was the "Linux, the home-user and small office product" and then there was the "Linux, spend lots of money on this superduper mainframe".
.ORG pavillion. The folks there were mostly friendly and talkative, and seemed equally happy to talk with suits, end-users, or administrator types like me.
I'm small fry. I use linux at home, bug hunt for some OSS projects, administer linux & UNIX at a 60-person company. My linux world revolves around home users, small offices, and nonprofits.
I couldn't even get anybody at the IBM, HP, AMD or RedHat booths to speak to me. They just wanted to scan my card and send me info. But when I asked simple questions ("So, tell me about the s390" "Do you have any server products for smaller offices or for nonprofits"?), the salespeople got huffy and would go pursue some bigger fish.
It was like they could tell, just from my haircut, that I don't have $400,000,000 to blow on an s390 mainframe.
Sun was the exception here. Out of all of the Big Business booths the folks in the Sun booth were really excited to show off their products to everyone. The Gnome 2.0 folks were thrilled to talk about small office users. The Cobalt Qube guys really wanted to show off the Qube interface.
I spent a good amount of time in the
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I don't want to dampen the Linux love fest at all, but I want to know if any attendees picked up a Mac OS X user's lunch tab while they were there.
:)
Lunch in SF can be pretty expensive, and Mac users have already given their shirt to buy a Macintosh, so...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Ten to twenty people, many of whom aren't from San Francisco, "march" on the San Francisco City Hall for a state issue. Nobody from City Hall meets them there. That is so clueless.
It would be a lot more effective to find some application San Francisco is running, badly, on closed source, and help them out. (Hint: the City Assessor's office is a mess.) SF tax revenues are way down since the dot-com thing tanked, and some help might be welcome. Once you get one or two successes, hold a press conference.
Just publicly donating a copy of Red Hat (since Red Hat's CTO was behind this) to the city, with the explaination that "you can make all the copies you want", made with suitable press coverage, would be more effective.
I thought I should say this loud. Bruce Perens is becoming one of the public persons I respect the most. He is resigning from a comfortable position at HP in order to be able to be more active in politics, and he wants to be politically active in order to defend the public interest, and ideals like freedom.
:-)
Most people have unfortunately ethics a posteriori. They (we) do whatever benefits them (us), and then find an ethical justification for whatever we do or we are. He is going the other around.
Bruce, let me just say thank you. People like you make this world a little nicer
It's understandable to be too productive to be someone else's employee because you're not being most efficiently utilized, but being too political to be someone else's employee is a different story. Maybe you should look at the Santa Clara unemployment rate and figure out if political inclination is as underutilized as it feels, before resigning from HP.
What part of under Federal investigation for criminal activity do you not grok?
I *never* said that the Gov't should only use opensource or GPLd' software. I'm saying that it's absurd for a Gov't to purchase products from a company that is breaking their laws.
/*drunk.. fix later*/