point taken. I guess the most amazing hacks are taking place not at MIT but around us. When the ordinary man, in the developing world, performs brilliant hacks day in and day out to survive. And when he fails at these he does the ultimate hack with a can of pesticide like in Andhra and like in wayanad. Note that my prevous post was in response to a post which included "But I cannot gather why *anyone* would need teaching for desktop GNU/Linux". The sole intention was to try to communicate the importance of the Desktop with reference to the people in and around Ernakulam, Kerala and Indian. Because I see GNU/Linux as a medium of social change and It pains to see Bill G increasing his wealth by selling his Windows Desktop in this poor mans country. Justin
"??????????????????.??????.?????? Vivek Varghese Cherian " <vivekcherian at gmail.com> wrote: On 4/7/06, justin joseph <justin_joseph007 at yahoo.com> wrote: The sucess of GNU/Linux systems would ultimatedly be decided by human beings and not just the hackers. We started learing english by trying to grasp a b c d e..z. and not by reading shakesphere. The nornal people out there would want a transistion from the mostly pirated windos environments they use. And for that the advocates of GNU/Linux would have to start from the Desktop first, and then show them the world of bash and VIM and Emacs. This would depend on the target audiance, students who are into the sciences need not bother about the desktop because they need to know the power and reach of GNU/Linux. Children would need apps and games they relate with. But the majority of people out there who are ignorant windows addicts would have to be shown the alternative first and here the Desktop would be the starting point. And I further think that the desktop is an important aspect, If am right then it was RMS who started the GNOME project though due to licensing issues related with KDE. And I think to call ourself hackers would be a statistical mistake, i doubt the percentage of people, on the list, who have contributed code to a GPL program would be under one percentage. Justin I have written a GNU FDLed documentation on Koha ( a search engine will reveal the fact). Does that make me one among the 1% you were mentioning about ? Mate, the Free Software movement is not just about writing code, its a state of mind where done thinks freely and lets others use your ideas while using theirs, all for the betterment of humanity. Hacking is not just coding, it's harmless clever playfulness and something that is a hack need not necessarily be socially acceptable or useful. To know more about hacks, kindly do visit http://hacks.mit.edu/ for some of the best hacks ever done. The Free Software movement is not about software alone, it's also about Free Documentation, Free Software activism, conducting Free Software promotion events and anyone who has done all/some/one/half/quarter/pint of the above have their worth in gold. The bottom line is coders don't brag. ps:- Sorry for hijacking this thread. -- Vivek Varghese Cherian Free as in Freedom <www.gnu.org> _______________________________________________ Mailinglist mailing list Mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org http://ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. PC-to-Phone calls for ridiculously low rates. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://ilug-cochin.org/pipermail/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org/attachments/20060411/ee7ff038/attachment-0001.htm
