Hi > On Friday 23 September 2005 13:49, Pankaj kaushal wrote: > >>Hello all, >> >>Since early this month, a discussion has been floating around and has >>been quite visible. Some background can be found from the following links. >>
>Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > Tell you what? Lots of people seem to disagree with the way foss.in is being > run (and possibly with the people running it). So go ahead. Call in Brian > Behlendorf, Wietse etc and do an event somewhere else other than bangalore. > Madras, or Delhi, or Hyderabad. Places that have active, thriving LUG > communities. Maybe the issue is not entirely about free or proprietory software. People are switiching to open source for a variety of reasons - philosophy, technical, economics whatever. There is that freedom to choose an element to believe in. But , well the but is simply its the core philosophy of open source - read transparency, read community involvement, read right to know that is the foundation of this movement.If People want to call it that and I think it is. So is every question about how a FOSS event going to be counterposed with do your own - well then whats the community about it, if the questions are valid they require a response with the same intention - that of being able to discuss things freely. Free and Open Source Source Software has a history and a philosophy born from that history. Just calling in the great names ??? of the open source software world does not make an event either an open source event nor is it reflective of a sense of community. Almost like saying call all the leader of democratic nations and it makes a great democratic summit, well just to pitch further its the difference between a G8 summit, or some trade summit and a World Social Forum. Both are events of democracy but its clear which is more democratic than the other. The former two have hidden agenda;s , read between the line stuff and negotiations that affect the poorest community somewhere - something that a community will only know when its too late. > > Speaking entirely for myself, as I've helped manage and run international > conferences for the last few years (sanog, apricot etc). If you have clear > well defined criteria for the cfp and you also ensure that the accepted > papers meet these criteria, you're all set, and that's what you can > reasonably expect from a good program committee. The question is who sets these criteria and who all know about it -and can potential presenters with radically different views hope to meet those criteria - even though they might be users and makers of fantastic software or some such FOSS stuff Also there must be lots of > community support for the event, so that it gets well attended. ahh the perennial question - will the community be there - we wont know till we try , and those who try would know would n't they. The fact is most decent communities always rally around , whatever the circumstances , The ones that are built with care and with real stuff more so. > > About the FOSS aspect, Linux, for me, is an OS, a tool to get things done the > best, fastest way. Free, open source, non free etc apps running on linux - I > dont particularly care as long as there's what is commonly termed > "operational content" - technical stuff, coding, sysadmining, operation etc > of linux and linux based apps, rather than marketing fluff. Yes - FOSS should not be any less that high cost proprietory software - but is that the starting point. Is the arguement going to be "unless it is as good or better " I won't use it - I am not sure thats the only thing that drives FOSS. Not for me atleast I am willing to be a part of the FOSS movement becuase its deeper - its about freedom and a real freedom of choice. That the technology may be superior etc is a factor that helps a lot. > > You'll find cray building non free (in fact, they cost about a million > dollars > apiece, and that's quite cheap as crays go) supercomputer clusters running > linux. Getting someone from Cray to present at that conference would be great > [we had Mark Dalton from cray at ilug chennai recently, its up on our site > wiki somewhere) So cray uses linux - so does NASA , yes they like the technology , the stability, security and scalability Linux offers - so they partake of good technology but do the believe that if they share what they know it would be more valuable ?? bet you that they have a different philosophy when it comes to their own knowlegde ?? Too much of a good thins isn't it. Take what comes free and the OS community will be happy because its free pubilicty for their cause. What does Cray / NaSA and the likes actually give to the community - will they give their source code - ever. I have my doubts - so then what is their stake ? > > srs > ram > _______________________________________________ > ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] > http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd > Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > > Event: Freedel 2005, 17th & 18th September, 2005 - http://freedel.in > _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Event: Freedel 2005, 17th & 18th September, 2005 - http://freedel.in
