Re: [fsf-community-team] [project seed] San Fransisco adopts a new software policy

[Simon Bridge]

On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 12:41 -0500, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 20:53, Simon Bridge <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 00:22 -0500, MBR wrote:
> >> I wish San Francisco luck.  They're going to need it!
> >>                         Mark Rosenthal
> > Lets not rely on luck then ;)
> 
> I have contacts in the Mayor's office. Chris Vein is in charge of Free
> Software for San Francisco.
> 
Good ho.

> > Lets rally the San Fran activists to this cause.
> 
> I'm posting this to the LUGs where I have spoken in the past, SF,
> Silicon Valley, Peninsula, Fremont, and OLPC-SF.
> 

All good stuff - in NZ, we managed to get businesses on board too - via
tho four business freedoms model: instead of stating the gnu freedoms,
we workshopped the meaning of freedom to businesses at a conference,
narrowed them down to the four everyone was happy to agree were
definitive. Turned out to look very familiar.

We also compiled a list of software support businesses.

Is there an effort to bring free software support firms around?
What are the web-sites interested list subscribers and bloggers should
be looking at?


> > Close monitoring and active lobbying has worked well to counter FUD and
> > dirty dealing. Its not as hard as it looks.
> 
> They have invited us to participate. They can save serious money, not
> only with office software and servers, but by replacing textbooks with
> Free Software and Creative Commons content. Textbooks cost much more
> than OLPC XOs and even some of their commercial competitors.
> California has a program for free as in beer textbooks, and we need to
> push for the next step.

Yep, keep up the pressure.
Also, continue to be prepared to offer assistance too.

> 
> I prefer the XO over the Intel Classmate and the others because the XO
> team has replaced even the BIOS with Free Software: Open Firmware,
> written in FORTH. (The only serious programming language whose source
> code can be read and understood in its entirety by ordinary
> programming students who know an assembly language.) Contrary to the
> FUD that has been about in the last year, there are no XOs being sold
> with Windows, and the next generation will run on ARM architecture
> processors, for which there is no Windows. I wonder what Microsoft
> will do?

FWIW: I know the people (sat down and talked to them, visited the site
where the work was in progress) whose job was to put Windows XP on the
XO. It was to be done by a plug-in card. And, I have a Windows CE PDA
with ARM architecture. ARM.com are very keen to crow about it.