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
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