hi,
was reading through this thread and something cropped up. this is completely off-topic as of now and might also be irrelevant but then relevance (as my prof said) is relative.
was watching a fine program on BBC y'day evening (~1900 IST) with a panel of this year's Nobel laureates sitting down with Nik Gowing to discuss why science is not being appreciated by the common man and society in general - why for every keystroke i make i do not wonder about the efforts of comp-sci personnel, scientists and hackers and consider society blessed (this is my personal addition). what the panel and especially the chemists and physicists agreed upon is that the scientific community requires communicators - 'someone like Richard P Feynmann' who could bridge the gap and make the connection. they also agree that this will not make people more appreciative of scientists by forgetting the stereotypical image, but this will help make society scientifically aware and inculcate scientific spirit and perhaps (they hope) vision. simplistic ? perhaps, but it will be a start.
i believe that the raising of funds should not be an one-time effort only. it must be made into a sustained initiative aimed at encouraging donations towards the cause of Free Software Movement in particular and 'freedom' in general. to get this initiative going one has to look beyond Free Software enthusiasts and volunteers as these are believers (captive consumers) of the -ism. we need to look towards larger population of academicians from diverse streams, businesses (small and large) whose lives and motivations are affected by using 'non-free' systems and deployments. in order to successfully do this, we need communicators, we need personalities and we need faces. it may sound as an anathema but the moment people connect an ism to a face/person the personal involvement becomes easier. a successful propagation of ideas and efforts of the FSF/FSFI coupled with a process for accepting donations would lead to a better initiative at Fund Raising. let us be realistic, could the regional nodes take on the responsibility of generating donations from non-enthusiasts via roadshows and presentations ?
take a local case for example, in his local area tathagata banerjee (coordinator fsf-westbengal) has a cybercafe owner who uses licensed MS OS and applications for all his machines. finally fed-up with the 'support' received from local MS after he had to re-install in the event of a hard drive crash, this person desired to change over to something more robust and stable and having license conditions that are not 'freedom curbing'. i am glad to announce that tathagata has personally helped the migration over to a GNU/Linux setup with the deployment being done in phases. these are cases that need to be talked about as it touches at a very believable personal level.
we need to create that belief, we need to create an appreciation and we need to do it over and over and over again....
have a wonderful day warm regards
sankarshan
-------------------- Everything that has a beginning, has an end - free your mind. --------------------
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