Re: [Fsfe-uk] Sep 27th will be GNU's 25th anniversary

[MJ Ray]

Ciaran O'Riordan <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> * A general free software event (we actually haven't done this before - not
>   with multiple speakers at least)

20th September is Software Freedom Day - is it OK to link the two?
If anyone in South West England wants to run (a) combined event(s),
please let me know on- or off-list and let's start organising.

[...]
> I was reminded by this anniversary by Bruce Perens' 10 look back at the Open
> Source marketing campaign:
> http://perens.com/works/articles/State8Feb2008/

That's glaringly biased - it doesn't mention the failure of the
initial Open Source Initiative and reinvention as a lawyer-driven
certification scheme for licences (which is dangerously misleading,
because you can make software under a free-software-possible licence
non-free if you try hard enough), loss of the Open Source trademark,
the OSI's notorious "no position" on software patents (contrary to
Bruce Perens's good work on the subject), or that it's time to speak
about free software again (which Perens signed up to, see
http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/whyfs.en.html
).

Even though it tries to take the edge off it, there are also more
insiduous misleading things in there, like claiming "One only had to
witness the attendance of the GPL 3 committees to see that the
importance of FSF's work was appreciated by the largest of
corporations" as if being appreciated by large corporations is a good
sign!  Maybe the whole "Open Source" thing has been good for the
amoral corporations, but has it been good for hackers?  We're now
saddled with a longer, more complex and maybe-backdoored intellectual
property licence.  Had GPL2 been successfully attacked anywhere?

Back to the corporation influence on GPL3, most large corporations are
psychopaths - see Joel Bakan's "The Corporation" for detailed
explanation - and their inclusion in GPL3 seemed to come at the
expense of ignoring regular hackers.  How many Community Interest
Companies were on the GPL3 committees?  How many cooperatives?  I
suspect none, else we probably wouldn't have all the abuse of
"cooperation" in the surrounding material.  How many Third Sector
Organisations of any type? It's hard to say from here, as only one of
the four committees member lists is published AFAICS and the main
noticeable thing is some public sector members, several from some
private sector orgs (Accenture, for example) and no obvious 3SOs.

The OSI tried to steal our revolution.  It's time to steal it back.
</rant>

Anyway, if you want to help celebrate BrandGNUday+25 and SFD in the
South West, mail me.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder,
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