First, my impression of the origins of this group is that a group of good guys, and a few beautiful women, were getting a little tired of Microsoft defining what personal computing was and could be.
Those who knew personal computing well also saw that you could do more with open source software, partly because you could modify it anyway that you wanted, and partly also because, with it not belonging to one big corporation, every computer user who used it had a stake in it's development. Because everybody who could write a little code could declare himself a resource in developing the free software, and maybe even be one, at some point the quality of free software would surpass proprietary software. An example of this is Firefox. Because everybody on earth can write add ons, create toolbars, or otherwise bug fix it, it now runs faster and has more versatility than Internet Explorer. That's because internet explorer only has the people who are being paid by microsoft and it's allies working on it. Open Office is very close to parity with Microsoft Office and will probably pass it in quality very soon for this very reason. So, the good guys and beautiful women founded MHVLUG, under the steady hand of Sean. It is a remarkable organization. Without even having a budget, it is a better fellowship than a lot of churches, a better training class than a lot of corporate in house training programs and a place where a guy like me, who can barely get Ubuntu configured, can get help. Ubuntu changed a lot of things. In the beginning, you couldn't install Linux without a lot of help. Now, I can install it while I am in the shower, except that especially streaming sites and a few die hard hardware manufacturers don't see that they are losing business by not thinking Linux, too. We are open source people. Owning software is like owning the air that you breathe. When gas heat first came out, you had to buy your stove from the gas company (I go back that far.) When I grew up, you rented your phone from the telephone company and their dire predictions that if you hooked up a phone that they didn't provide into their system, you might busy out America, didn't pan out. Microsoft is in the same mentality. Their mentality will go the way of the store that PSE+G used to run in Hoboken where you could buy an "approved" stove, or those awful "Phone Center Stores" that AT+T ran in the late 1980's that sold overpriced junk didn't know that Caller ID existed. There is still a way to go, yet, but already more people go online with Linux than with Apple. We are here to support those people as they learn a new way to use a PC. We also help them with the problems they incur learning the new ways, like if they can't get grub to boot up Windows, or if a page doesn't open right in Linux. But there already is a very good Windows club in Mid Hudson which, like Windows, charges $35 a year for the same thing that we give away for free, namely membership. We don't need to duplicate that. Although we all feel threatened by the efforts of some ill intentioned people to make it impossible for the guy in his garage to find new ways to use a computer by hanging him up in legal red tape, we can only do so much on a small chat site. And most of us are already painfully aware of the problem. We need to remind ourselves that we are the open source people and we only deal with proprietary software and politics to the degree that it facilitates helping open source people use their systems. Sorry for the rant, but the group is at a crossroads. Open source computing is changing so quickly that we need to remember our roots and objectives. Again, sorry for the rant. -- Robert Mark Wallace 60 Delaware Road Newburgh, NY 12550-3802 Telephone : 9845) 566-0586 _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Aug 4 - Samba Sep 1 - BOINC Oct 6 - Creating Firefox Extensions
