Hi, For those who haven't seen it, http://www.opencode.org.
Seems to be a project by law students and "internet activists" to get end users involved in free software, support free software development, and work on free software advocacy. I don't know anything about it beyond the web site, so add a grain of salt, but it looks cool. The problem is that these guys are not free software developers, and may not represent our interests. On the other hand, the essay on that site shows that their heart is in the right place, it appears that they have good legal/academic/lobbyist connections, and IMO involving end users in this way is a 200% more exciting goal than getting yet another big corporation to donate some token code. (My free software work has been on the Debian Tutorial and Gnome, so clearly their goals and mine are similar. :-) I would like to see SPI the developer's organization work very closely with them. I'd like to see them contributing to Debian; to achieve their goals they need a 100% free operating system, and Debian is the only one right now. SPI needs people to do outreach, advocacy, lobbying, finance, legal stuff. They need people to write code, and they need free software "street cred." Could be a great pairing. They are also not yet organized and their goals aren't set in stone; there's some sort of online meeting on May 20, and SPI members should be there pushing for something like the Social Contract and advocating developer's interests. Maybe the H2O people can even become a part of SPI instead of starting their own group. Anyway, I plan to get involved with this if I can and I hope others will give it some thought too. Thanks, Havoc http://pobox.com/~hp
