RE: [Fsuk-manchester] Announcing the "Federation of Free Software UK

[Luke Taylor]

> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 10:51:56 +0100
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Announcing the "Federation of Free Software UK
>
> > Personally, I think the problem with AF for FFSUK will be the
> > revolutionary communist association, not the anarchist one.
> > http://www.af-north.org/?q=aims+and+principles
>
> ...that and the fact that 99% of people rightly or wrongly associate
> the word "anarchism" with violent clashes between the BNF and Unite
> Against Fascism and windows getting smashed.
>
> Philosophy is all well and good, but when you're trying to pitch to
> your boss why having Debian on the web box is beneficial to his
> business and profits, having the word "anarchism" mentioned anywhere
> in the business case is not going to do you any favours.
>
> Me: "Free software is great because it has the latest features and
> security patches developed by a huge community rather than having to
> wait for a single-point-of-failure development house"
> Boss: "I like it, have a pay rise"
>
> Me: "Free software is great because together, comrades, we will use it
> to smash the oppressive forces of tyranny and overthrow the government
> with our iron fist of protest"
> Boss: "Ummm, right, I've been meaning to have a chat with you about
> some redundancies we've got to make in the company"
>
> Pete

lol, I think that the association with violence is kind of fair (that isn't what they are about but half my house mates have "assaulted" policemen in self-defence) but I didn't mean that we should formally endorse anarchism as a group. I just meant that we should establish links with them in order to get free software higher up on their agenda and widen our contacts and possibilities for future events. It is an easy kill really, since they basically already agree, the difficult bit will be convincing them that it is as important as SMASHING BOURGEOISIE DECADENCE.

In summary: We don't aim to endorse them or their cause, they endorse our cause. win-win unless somebody's boss goes through the wiki and finds out the MFS went to the anarchist-cum-FOSS tea party and decides on the strength of that to buy MS Server R2.

Luke

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