Re: [Fsfe-uk] OSS Supporters - Was Re: Expo

[Alex McLintock]

> At 10:42 AM 10/14/02 +0100, Alex McLintock wrote:
> > I run one of a number of small to medium sized companies who want to 
> > provide support for Free Software to other companies.
> > To help us all I have set up a directory of these companies to be found 
> > at the URL below.


At 11:53 14/10/02, Martyn Ranyard wrote:
> Good work, and I will be registering our company, but I have the following 
> initial feedback :
> 1) Open Source is not necessarily Free - Free Software is what AFFS / FSFE 
> are about, maybe you should think of making it the Free Software support list.


Quite so. Open Source is not necessarily Free, but it is *most* of the 
time. I don't want to get into a religious or socio-political discussion 
about it. Would it be ok if I used the phrase "Open Source and Free 
Software" so that I don't confuse potential users? I can of course link to 
the FSF website. What is the best URL to publicise?


> 2) Your list of "Open Source" projects is very limited - I have added a 
> list at the end of this mail of suggestions.


Yep, that was a deliberate decision too. I wanted people such as yourself 
to suggest packages that they support. I didn't want to add loads of 
software which had no one supporting it :-)

I will add your list of software...



> 3) Areas of expertise - obviously for example "setting up a RAID server ....


There is an argument which basically says that companies basically want 
problem solvers (such as your firm) rather than support in a particular 
package.

Should we, for example, say that we offer system integration services for 
Free Software? Maybe companies would be keener to take up Free Software if 
they had reliable companies who could solve their *business* problems?







martyn suggested adding the following...

Samba; netatalk; GhostScript; APSFilter; Bind; Postfix; Sendmail; Qmail; 
Sane; OpenSSL; OpenSSH; FreeS/WAN; KDE; Gnome; VNC (not Free afaik); 
Cygwin; Transcode; FFMpeg; mplayer/mencoder; Plex86; raidtools; XFS; 
ReiserFS; ext3; FreePascal; Lazarus; PostgreSQL; MySQL; NUT; Gimp; 
ImageMagick; bash; Python; ipchains; iptables; sox; Horde;  I give up, I 
can't think of any more, my brain is fried.


I think that perhaps we should add a generic entry to describe a group of 
packages.... for instance

"image scanning" - sane, and others....
"image manipulation" - Gimp, IMageMagick, etc
"firewall", ipchains, iptables, etc,

If the database becomes too hard to use then potential users wont search 
through it.....







Openweb Analysts Ltd, London.
Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/
Open Source Software Companies please register here 
http://www.OWAL.co.uk/oss_support/