Re: Fwd: [Fsuk-manchester] Meeting reminder - Free Software Manchester - tomorrow 7pm

[Paul Waring]

(Disclaimer: I'm a member of both FoE and Greenpeace, so I might be a
bit biased in my reply)

On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 06:52:56PM +0000, Tim Dobson wrote:
>    It would be interesting to hear what would happen if you asked a
>    (local) Green Party Councilor or for more entertainment, try a Friends
>    of the Earth Activist.

Last time I checked, the Green Party were in favour of open source
software, they even passed two motions at their 2005 conference
promoting FOSS and opposing software patents. As for Friends of the
Earth, I'm not sure why it would be entertaining to ask a member of that
group their opinion - is there a particular point you are trying to make
there?

>    Could one compare the likes of
>    Greenpeace (just make it happen; destroy nukes) to the open source
>    software movement,
>    and the likes of Friends of the Earth (do it ethically; if you are
>    going to do it at all) to the Free Software movement.
>    ?

If anything, I would compare Greenpeace (centralised, top-down
organisation) to the closed source model and FoE (decentralised,
grassroots/bottom-up) to free software -but that's more to do with how
they run themselves rather than any of their policies. I can tell you
that they both run FOSS for some of their IT infrastructure (not sure
about their desktops) and if you put either of their names into Google
followed by 'open source software' you'll get some interesting articles.

Paul

-- 
Paul Waring
http://www.pwaring.com