My wife is Bulgarian, her father was ina Communist prison camp . . . Oh, Dear, Richmond gets personal again!
Yes, he does . . . I would like to take issue with Senor Garzia: (and, I suppose this all comes down to politics) I am not a socialist, and not a communist, and not a supporter of pie-in-the-sky ideas propped up by some sage's half-baked ideology that fails to take human nature into account. Earliert his year I went to Sofia (Capital of Bulgaria) and listened to Richard Stallman, and reached the follwoing conclusions: 1. He is a long-haired hippy rather like the ones in Brazil (mind you, I bet he can't speech portugese). 2. I agreed with almost everything he said - BUT not for the silly, loony-lefty reasons he gave. 3. I want a world where there is NO social handout system; BUT where everybody has a reasonably level playing-field to start off from: so they can't come whining, subsequently, about being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, as an excuse for their laziness or turpitude. I am also not a utopian who wishes to sweep away Microsoft and Macintosh for a 'new millenium' of open source software full of holes. To prove a point, I'm writing this to you in Firefox (an open source browser) running on Windows XP (not open source unless I'm very stupid and missed something). I do 90% of my programming on a number of Macintosh computers with Mac OS X that cost me a whole lot of money which I earned with my own, fair, used-to-be lily-white hands. However, I do think that there is a place for open source initiatives; especially in places such as (and if any one wants to point out that I am not politically correct; don't waste your time - I am a fairly right-wing reactionary - so there) Africa (or, to put it really crudely; the places where the colonial powers made the mistake of leaving without bothering to educate the local people so they could get ahead rather than become prey to horrible dicators; c.f. Mugabe, Idi Amin, and so on), India and the rest of the sub-continent, where a very large section of the population doesn't stand a chance to get on the escalator which will give them a chance in a proper meritocracy. What is a big sadness to me is that open-source software is associated with lefties, 'pinkos', 'long-haired loonies' or whatever, when the need to use open-source should be seen not as a political stance at all, but as a way to increase everybody's level of knowledge, wealth and so on. Now, one day a week, from February, I will be offering Bulgarian school teachers, free programming classes using the Novell RR 2.2.1 on Ubuntu - all their school computers (such as they are - few) run on Microsoft Windows 98 - it is their problem as to how they transfer that empowering knowledge; either by badgering the BG government to buy licences for RR, or by badgering the govt/local ed. authority to go open source. Why am I offering these free classes ? - because it will work as an advertisement for both my language school and for my freelance computer installation and programming work. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson __________________________________________________ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html _______________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
