Hi! All, Well interesting thread. I had been quite as I was interested in watching the general trend adopted by this thread. Unfortunately, we are again heading for standard discussion of money versus knowledge sharing. Why is it that most of our OSS vs. proprietary discussions end up being discussion of making (or not making) money from open source. Everyone wants to make money, including myself. If there is anyone in the list who is not interested in earning money, please let me know. I think the area of discussion for this thread was, whether it is appropriate to accept sponsorship from M$ by an event which is promoting open source. M$ claimed that they want to educate clients on there new stance on open source but to me it appeared to be a claim only. I failed to understand how demonstration of Vista and M$ Office 2007 was geared towards OSS support. Also, i have heard from some of the attendees of CXO summit that M$ distributed evaluation copies of proprietary software at CXO summit. I have not seen the cds myself so i cannot guarantee the authenticity of the information. So overall I failed to notice any activity by M$ which would show support for OSS at an event promoted as premium open source event. (please correct me if i am wrong) On the other hand i would differ with community too. When everyone was aware of the fact that M$ is sponsoring the event then why to withdraw from the event, completely? I am not saying we should have participated but we could have been there passively as attendees. After all, LA is not an event where only Linux geeks participate. Over the years we have noticed that several newbies come to LA looking for what is Linux/OSS.. But this year they found M$ demonstrating proprietary software. When community was so much worried about M$ sponsoring an OSS event, I am unable to understand what prevented them from attending the event and debating M$ speakers/representatives in front of audience. I am not saying that we should have bullied anyone but we should have debated how promotion of proprietary software is helping OSS. LA had free community pass which could have been used as an entry point. We are having a good intellectual discussion on the list which is politically correct too but i dont think this is serving any purpose. How do we ensure that attendees, brain washed by M$, become aware of our point of view. I noticed lot of students in LA who would have seen n number of presentations by M$ in there college. Now they come to a Linux event and find M$ there too.
I was a speaker at LA and only driving force for me was presence of M$. (I dont know why my name was missing from the speakers list, probably my profile reached them too late). I decided to speak because i wanted to present people with the richness and ease of OSS based frameworks compared to M$ .net framework.(My 2 cents at promoting OSS). I was at LA in individual capacity and not as a member of LUG or "in house" speaker to EFY group (if i find the person who started the rumor of "in house" speaker, i would skin him with a blunt knife. Promise!!!). What i did is not special or unique. There are ample examples of OSS supporters conducting talks/events parallel to M$ activities and best example being FreedomHEC which is conducted every year in Los Angeles parallel to M$'s WinHEC event. To sum it all i dont find any use of having an intellectual discussion on mailing list and making hoop hula about M$'s presence in an event promoted as premium open source event. M$ is here to stay and so are we. So imho we have to learn to interact with M$ and learn to give hard time (read it, "prevent" ) to M$ and event organizers when they try to promote proprietary software at an event claiming to support OSS. regards VK PS :- Can someone get a news printed in a daily newspaper, regarding this discussion? g,d,r regards VK Engineers normally have problem with every solution. If not they have a solution in search of a problem. http://creative.linux-delhi.org Disclaimer The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the opinions to me. The distinction is yours to draw... ____________________________________________________________________________________ TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
