On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Wm. G. McGrath wrote:
> In the real world, an IT professional may be called upon to support many > licences, so it's important to provide an objective platform or > standpoint that is ideology neutral as well as vendor and distro neutral > and allows a professional to do their job without getting involved in > such 'concerns'. The above is in and of itself an ideology - that being inclusive of all licenses/distros/etc makes one more "professional". I have seen this in many political discussions, with one side defining their point of view as being the "natural" one and the other side being "politically motivated" or idealistic. I am very up-front in my business where I both describe "Open Systems, Free Software, and Why?" <http://www.flora.ca/open.shtml> and define my "Proprietary Software surcharge" in my rates <http://www.flora.ca/rates.shtml>. If someone tries to hire me to work on proprietary licensed products, I will just point them to those documents. Getting "in the door" and then having these things come up would be extremely counter-productive. I believe that being up-front about things is going to get you much further. There is nothing you can do to attract everyone to your group : you need to decide who you want to be part of your group, which by definition involves excluding others (or more specifically, setting up conditions such that some people won't want to join). CLUE will never have all Canadian Linux users as membership - this is simply impossible to do. > Remember few flame wars are ever resolved successfully. That's not where > we want to go. Being open and up front, defining your terms in a FAQ - that is how to avoid flame wars. Stating that being license-liberal and "professional" will avoid them is in-and-of-itself flamebait. > bill --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions Getting Open Source and Linux INto GovernmentS | No2Violence in Politics http://www.flora.org/dmca/forum/942 | http://www.no-dot.ca/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
