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Boy Scouts Ask Open Source Community For Help
Lucas123 writes "The Boy Scouts of America are looking to the open-source community for help in building software to use for fundraisers, special events, and other functions, for their more than 121,000 local scout troops. Some open source advocates, who are former Boy Scouts, support the idea, despite a few reservations. According to the article, there are no plans for a scout merit badge in open source — but there has been a merit badge in computers since 1967, 'and it is possible that if the program is successful, it could eventually be used by IT-savvy scouts themselves.'"
Until they remove the "MPAA approved" copyright merit badge, dont help them in any way.
Or... Does anybody remember THIS? I do.
Congrats to everyone who responded to this thread. That whizzing noise you heard was the joke going over your head.
Parent was a joke based on the fact that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) have the same three-letter abbreviation.
Parent was referring to the second BSA (the MS mouthpieces).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Really? Then how come the BSA has awards for Jewish members (the Ner Tamid award -- I won it back in '75), and my nephew just became an Eagle scout?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I was a boyscout. I was in it since graduating Cub scouts and stayed in until venture scouts. While not getting my eagle, I was very active and did a lot.
Boy scouts to me was all about hanging out with my friends, going camping, going backpacking, shooting guns, making lashing structures, sailing, swimming, cooking, basket weaving, learning first aid and emergency prep, knot tying, metal working and a whole host of other things. Boy scouts was where I was introduced to DnD, the best thing to play when your'e out in the wilderness with absolutely no electricity and only your imagination. It was a wonderful experience, now as an adult my fellow scouts are my best friends and the scoutmasters are revered mentors. It helped me grow into a Man, and if I have a boy I will more than likely enroll him.
The point is, our troop was nothing more than boys and their dads. We don't have some clergy like the church ruling our actions. In fact the scout leaders FORCED us to do EVERYTHING. We planned the trips, the meals, the transportation, the meetings, the lessons. They merely assisted and guided. What this means is that all the talk I hear now of homophobia and anti-atheist discrimination is a kind of surprise. It NEVER came up in my troop, I'd say a good majority of them weren't associated with any religion.
The troop's views are the sum of its constituents. It's not that The Boy Scouts are passing down from on high that no gay kids are allowed. Hell I think we had at least one in our troop. Did it make a difference? No, the whole thing was about having fun, not excluding people.
I'm sure that the troops that make the news with this, and the top level administration pandering to their evangelical base are simply made up of people who think homosexuality is a sin and atheists are immoral. Don't forget a good portion of America DOES think this. It's a reflection of a portion of the population.
So know, that yes there are liberal troops out there that don't concern themselves with exclusion, only with the boys and making their lives better. I'm a testament to it, and I'm certain there's hundreds others like me. As time rolls the general views of America's population will change, and then so will the Scouts. Until then, denying them them help, when helping would teach an excellent lesson is unecessarily mean. I know that I will try to help if this project comes around. All the boys don't deserve to be punished for what wrong people say.
BE PREPARED.
As an AC has already mentioned, your troop leaders were breaking the rules. I sure there are a lot of people involved in Scouting who are like that. Indeed, tolerance and respect for unusual opinions and orientations would seem to be consistent with the whole Scouting ethos.
But officially speaking the rule is no gays or atheists. And as long as that's the rule, a lot of us are just not going to have anything to do with the BSA, no matter how tolerant some of its individual participants are.
That's a real straw man. With rare exception, atheists and gays are not out to change people's private beliefs and practices. What they do want is to establish equal rights and standing for themselves in the public sphere, and that is a goal we should all be able to stand behind.
It's rather predictable that people would confound a strong stance on atheist/gay rights with rabble-rousing and crass noisemaking, though; after all, that's precisely the same reaction with which all manner of civil rights activists have been received in the past, be they slavery abolitionists, or women's suffragists, or anti-segregationists.
So you're probably correct that the parent poster got by in the BSA without incident by not making noise such as, e.g., refusing to recite the Boy Scouts pledge which commits one to a religious deity. And that's the problem. Until gays and atheists can proclaim themselves as openly as Christians and straights do in any public or semi-public organization, and not be required to pay lip service or deference to the Judeo-Christian worldview -- without being kicked out, or frowned upon, or generally treated as second-class citizens -- then our work is not yet done.
(Fortunately for the parent poster, his local scoutmasters were apparently more tolerant than the national organization: discrimination against gays and atheists is still very much the official policy within the organization.)