Well, here it is people, as promised. Tell me what you think, and if it's okay I'll have it printed and whoever is interested may come by my office to sign before I have it sent.
-- dido Te capiam, cuniculus sceleste! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To Her Excellency Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo President of the Republic of the Philippines Makati City, Philippines, September 30, 2004 Your Excellency, We, the undersigned, a group of concerned citizens who work in the field of information and communication technology, have heard of your "People's PC" program that will offer affordable personal computers to the Filipino people. While this is a laudable program, and we wish this program to be as successful as possible, the project does have some loose ends that we would like to see addressed. >From what we know, the computers to be provided are bare, and do not include any operating system or other software necessary for its proper operation. As you are no doubt aware, a computer without such software cannot really do anything, and thus, such software must be procured before the computer can be good for doing anything even remotely useful. While illicit channels are, sadly, still readily available for obtaining such software today, obtaining legitimate copies of the traditional type of software for this purpose is expensive, and would defeat the purpose of the program. A complete set of such software could easily cost much more than the projected price point for the computer hardware itself. However, there are also perfectly legitimate alternatives available at minimal cost. The GNU/Linux operating system, a complete and fully featured operating system that is collaboratively developed by groups of programmers from all over the world under licenses that specifically permit its redistribution and modification, is looking to be a viable, low-cost alternative to the traditional operating systems in wide use today. The Advanced Science and Technology Institute of the Department of Science and Technology itself has developed its own variant of the GNU/Linux operating system, known as Bayanihan Linux, and it has been used to good effect by the University of the Philippines. The undersigned therefore humbly suggest that the program encourage the use of the GNU/Linux operating system by offering the software to everyone who obtains a computer through the program. This way, the beneficiaries of the program receive a fully functional computer complete with all the software they need to become productive with it, at no additional cost to them. This will also encourage the use and development of Linux and other Free and Open Source Software by Filipinos, which will serve to increase our nation's competitiveness in the ICT arena. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
