[fsf-community-team] A first exercise

[Holmes Wilson]

Hey everyone,

Here's a good example of something we'd like this list to respond to. 
People often send FSF emails pointing to blog posts that require some 
kind of response from the free software community.

This is a particularly good example, because it's not even the case that 
somebody's especially antagonistic to the ideas of free software-- 
they're just kinda lost ;)

Have a look this article and propose a response to the list.  I think in 
this case it would be good to draft both a comment and a short note to 
the author to his own email address or through a contact form (can 
somebody get this?).

Try to keep it clear, concise, and polite.  No cruft!  Let's discuss the 
best response here first before sending it through... we'd like to do 
things this way while we're getting started.

Also, some pretty heavy discussion kicked up over the weekend and we've 
had some unsubscribe requests.  I think that's natural since this will 
be a very active list (and people will obviously have their own 
questions and ideas about how best to explain free software, for 
example) but we should be careful to keep things productive.  This will 
be a lot easier when we have more work to do :)

So let's focus on this dry run and see how it goes.

-Holmes

> *CNet blog Network* writer Dennis O'Reilly makes several erroneous
> statements in his 20 Oct 2009
> article<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-10378605-68.html>  titled
> 'Finding the Catch in Free Software'. Most glaring among his 
mis-statements
> is:
>> The GNU GPL stipulates that the software can be used, copied, and
>> distributed verbatim without limitation, though it cannot be changed.
>
> The guy claims to have been writing about tech since 1985,&  will
> presumably continue writing for some time. Would FSF be interested in
> undertaking an effort to improve O'Reilly's understanding of FLOSS?
>