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Fun and Informative Way to Introduce Open Source?

Posted by Cliff on from the indoctrinations-made-easy dept.

jwg asks: "I work in an office environment where I provide technical services and solutions to my co-workers (as I am sure most Slashdot readers do at their respective places of employment). Once a month, we have a round-table meeting to discuss pressing issues in our office. At the beginning of these meetings, it is one person's job to provide some form of 'professional development', usually an activity or game to teach some skill, idea, or trend directly related to their job. My turn is coming up soon, and I would like to introduce my co-workers to the idea (and to some, the way of life) of Open Source. There are many examples of Open Source software and communities out there to reference (Mozilla, Wikipedia, MySQL and... oh yeah, Linux), but has anyone come up with or come across a method to introduce it in a quick, fun, and informative way to a wide variety of people each of which possess a even wider range of technical skill? Did I mention it has to be fun?"

6 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    you could always try the whole falling thing you know where everyone catches the falling person. then demonstrate it if everyone tried to make there catching system "propritary"

  2. Viruses by superpulpsicle · · Score: 4, Funny

    Bring a couple hundred viruses into the office, they'd be glad to not use proprietory windows afterwards.

    1. Re:Viruses by TheOtherAgentM · · Score: 5, Funny

      I was going to say to bring a nice packet sniffer in the week before and then present them with their private emails and instant messages. Tell them they can be a super spy too with open source.

  3. Two Words: by Mad_Rain · · Score: 4, Funny

    Enemy Territory.

    Okay, some further explanation might be in order - it's an FPS that was released free to the public. It can be used/modified by anyone who is interested because it is - Open Source. And play a game or two (if your office can handle your l33t pwn4g3 sk1llz!) before steering the conversation in to the other good things about Open Source.

    --
    "What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
  4. Fun and Informative Way to Introduce Open Source? by OctoberSky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do anything but show them source code.

  5. Show them the command-line by __aahsof7392 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kill all of your processes.
    $ ps -ef|awk '{print $2}'|xargs kill

    Edit a file and delete the first and last line.
    $ vi
    1GddGdd:wq!

    Find out what's filling up your home directory.
    $ du -k|sort -rn|head

    Who has access to the computer?
    # cat /etc/passwd|cut -d: -f1,3

    Add commas to numerical strings
    sed -e :a -e 's/\(.*[0-9]\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1,\2/;ta'