Ciaran O'Riordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > * A general free software event (we actually haven't done this before - not > with multiple speakers at least)
20th September is Software Freedom Day - is it OK to link the two? If anyone in South West England wants to run (a) combined event(s), please let me know on- or off-list and let's start organising. [...] > I was reminded by this anniversary by Bruce Perens' 10 look back at the Open > Source marketing campaign: > http://perens.com/works/articles/State8Feb2008/ That's glaringly biased - it doesn't mention the failure of the initial Open Source Initiative and reinvention as a lawyer-driven certification scheme for licences (which is dangerously misleading, because you can make software under a free-software-possible licence non-free if you try hard enough), loss of the Open Source trademark, the OSI's notorious "no position" on software patents (contrary to Bruce Perens's good work on the subject), or that it's time to speak about free software again (which Perens signed up to, see http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/whyfs.en.html ). Even though it tries to take the edge off it, there are also more insiduous misleading things in there, like claiming "One only had to witness the attendance of the GPL 3 committees to see that the importance of FSF's work was appreciated by the largest of corporations" as if being appreciated by large corporations is a good sign! Maybe the whole "Open Source" thing has been good for the amoral corporations, but has it been good for hackers? We're now saddled with a longer, more complex and maybe-backdoored intellectual property licence. Had GPL2 been successfully attacked anywhere? Back to the corporation influence on GPL3, most large corporations are psychopaths - see Joel Bakan's "The Corporation" for detailed explanation - and their inclusion in GPL3 seemed to come at the expense of ignoring regular hackers. How many Community Interest Companies were on the GPL3 committees? How many cooperatives? I suspect none, else we probably wouldn't have all the abuse of "cooperation" in the surrounding material. How many Third Sector Organisations of any type? It's hard to say from here, as only one of the four committees member lists is published AFAICS and the main noticeable thing is some public sector members, several from some private sector orgs (Accenture, for example) and no obvious 3SOs. The OSI tried to steal our revolution. It's time to steal it back. </rant> Anyway, if you want to help celebrate BrandGNUday+25 and SFD in the South West, mail me. Regards, -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list Fsfe-uk@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
