Moving to Plug-Misc because it's probably going to be a long discussion that should not clutter up the technical list. I'd suggest posting there instead of in the main PLUG list.
On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 14:25 +0800, Marvin T. Pascual wrote: > I can't stand it anymore. If you just read the postcript of Federico D. > Pascual Jr. at http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS200612032602.htm it is > unfair to us advocates of the F/OSS that we don't have any press releases > defending our advocacies. Maybe it's about time to have our own press > releases. Having our own press releases is a good thing. perhaps members of this and other FOSS lists can provide the text and the PLUG board can edit, post on the website, and email to editors, reporters and columnists. Getting mad about this doesn't help. There's a lot of money on the other side of the equation. Pascual might have been paid (or at least wined and dined) to write what he did. On the other hand, he might also just have been brainwashed by someone from Microsoft, with no quid pro quo. > Anyone here connected to any press companies and/or having its own blog? > Can you guys help us out defend and enlighten the people that adopting > F/OSS is not an overall disadvantage to our government but a benefit to > all of us? In fact, I'm not convinced that FOSS is going to be a net plus. I tend to think that the general result is going to be positive. But some of that is prejudice (I prefer FOSS to payware) and most of it is knowledge (I use it everyday and where I work a lot of us use it exclusively, but we're the geeks, the regular office workers are a bit hard to budge from their virus-ridden windows computers). I tend to think that a more nuanced position is more correct than a straight FOSS only versus MS-only position. But anything nuanced is hard to sell. Generally, I would say that accusing Pascual (or Banal, from a previous thread) of being paid to write drivel is probably counter productive. they will deny it, and they will win the shouting match (he who has the more powerful loudspeaker wins). Trying to educate them, and the rest of media, with informative presentations and discussions is going to be more productive. As a practical matter, I would avoid discussion of the GPL and free as in speech, actually. Except in the sense that free as in speech helps government because the source is available and if the software developer doesn't want to support government anymore, then the government has a fighting chance to get support elsewhere (versus being hostage to closed source and being forced to pay whatever ransom is needed to get support again). tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo [EMAIL PROTECTED] Business Systems Development, KFC/Mr Donut/Ramcar ...If you give up A, C, I, and D, of course you get better performance- just like you can get better performance from a wheel-less Yugo if you slide it down a luge track. -- Scott Marlowe - on pgsql-general -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo [EMAIL PROTECTED] Business Systems Development, KFC/Mr Donut/Ramcar If you don't love Jesus, go to hell! -- Richard (Kinky) Friedman _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
