A short list of things I want out of TLUG

[Peter]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Sy wrote:

> It's hard to communicate that open source is the right choice for
> moral reasons.. or that it simply "feels good".  The culture of
> business is so utterly alien it's freaky.. I'm sure that's why it's
> sometimes mistaken as evil.

Anything that is sufficiently different and competes will be considered 
in turn, evil, unconstitutional, to be exorcised, made illegal, or 
otherwise disabled. It is a measure of the degree of civilisation of the 
defending team whether they accept progress in due time or resort to 
thumbscrews and bailiffs to prevent it as long as possible.

> I can still see not insignificant corrupting influences and a slew of
> nasty tricks by the powers in place.  I see this entire open source
> thing as one big threat to a well-entrenched culture.

Other notable nasty threats were men of protestant faith in a Catholic 
world, freed men in slaving times, steam engines and looms about a 
century and a half ago, and so on. If you expect progress to be greeted 
with applause and ovations you must have missed most of your history 
lessons imho.

> This isn't even an "open source" versus "closed source" battle of
> philosophies.. this is a "old money" (think founding technologies)
> versus "new money" (think dotcom) versus those "free love hippy tree
> hugging software developers". ;)

A normal businessman who runs an operation that is not bankrupt will 
always look at the bottom line. The bottom line for the use of free 
software and open source is such, that all the major IT players have 
embarked on it, quietly, not quietly, nerver mind how, but they are all 
*in*. So never mind what they *say* mind what they *do*. For example 
90+% of emails coming from IT people who reject open software use offers 
for their organisations are forwarded by open source mail transport 
agents in their own organisations. At least that's what I saw by 
collecting headers for a while.

So it's easy: keep doing what you do, do it well, and know that the 
economical pressures that make an IT person think twice about an 
extortionate server license price given alternatives are your best 
ticket for the future.

$0.02
Peter
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