Re: [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: OSS Watch inaugural conference, 11 December 2003

[Alex Hudson]

On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 06:46, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> May I know whether we  have we tried to get in touch with JISC before
> writing them off?

We weren't actually talking about JISC, we were talking about OSS Watch.
OSS Watch is a project funded by JISC, but certainly JISC itself has no
claims about using or promoting free software. 

AFFS hasn't contacted OSS Watch in any meaningful way about this or
anything else; but then we don't really tend to send out unheralded mail
telling people to do things differently (unless those people are
politicians ;). Andrew (who is on the advisory committee) is obviously
aware of the discussion having taken part on it, and I know others in
OSS Watch are also aware of it, but AFFS itself so far doesn't really
have a view so it wouldn't make sense to contact them officially.

> We probably have to try few times for the AFFS to be recognised as a
> body that should be kept within a loop of internal info emanating from
> the JISC.

JISC itself - unlikely. I'm not sure to what extent JISC keeps academics
in the loop, let alone non-academics: most people I've spoken to know of
JISCMail but nothing really of JISC. OSS Watch we obviously do have an
interest in, and we keep roughly up-to-date with what they're doing, as
we try to with all the free software-oriented projects in academia and
beyond. 

AFFS are probably a little too 'biased' for OSS Watch's liking I would
imagine, but the event they are holding has enough free software people
that I trust that I still think it looks useful. The MS guy appears to
be being involved in a plenary, rather than giving a talk about Shared
Source or something equally vile, although discussing the proposition
"Does Open Source matter?" seems a trifle odd - presumably, if the
answer is no then all the delegates have just wasted a day ;)

> If we just sit around not doing anything the next AFFSOC might have M$
> lecturing about this new found freedom.

Over my dead body ... ;)

Cheers,

Alex.