Re: [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: OSS Watch inaugural conference, 11 December 2003

[Alex Hudson]

On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 15:35, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> True. I was sleepy but being fresh now I do not think my suggestion to
> explore JISC was too bad an idea. Especially w.r.t to Tom Coady's
> suggestion that there are funding related obligations and all this being
> within the realms of HE. 

To an extent, JISC are really puppets - as in, their strings are those
of a publically funded body, so the people to target are the politicians
(as usual). In a lot of ways, I would guess they don't make many
strategic decisions themselves, since although they are not publically
funded directly, their funding comes from HE/FE organisations, and hence
their decisions reflect the interests of those organisations.
Personally, I suspect these orgs. will be the last to be "converted" -
the are traditionally not risky organisations, and they have more and
more autonomy from central Govt. (and hence central social policy
directives).

> Cool. With OSS watch we already have a lead then...
> IMHO a leaflet stand itself at the forthcoming event could go a long
> way.

I'm not sure how much use a stand would be, but talking to people there
definitely would be useful. If anyone wants to go.... ;)

> The reality on the ground is when students attend HE they get bombarded
> with painful options (Word processor to specilist software) and setup to
> go and restrict the freedoms of others.

Actually, I think HE students tend to be in a reasonably powerful
position. They have far more ability to choose how they will study than
most, and there is sufficient scope on most courses to not have to do
development of non-free software (although I hear that introductory
courses to programming are moving away from Scheme/Haskell and towards
Java..). It's the FE students that have most problems.

> > AFFS are probably a little too 'biased' for OSS Watch's liking
> 
> Can we even compare the very different interests?
> We are about the primary benefits about a model of development they are
> on about. I am not suggesting we jettison promoting OS models of
> development but that we do not allow us to be even compared with some
> one whose goal is not freedom.

Actually, I think they are directly comparable. The discussion is of
which software model is "better". The open-source view of this is that
having access to code gives advantages, as does the multi-vendorship of
the market, etc. The free software view is that while those are
advantages, there are also other advantages to be had through
acknowledgement of freedoms - ability to control where your business
goes, what expenditure you make when, etc. The interests are actually
roughly the same, it's just the qualitative thinking that is different.

I actually find it's easier to sell free software to business people
rather than academics. But that really goes back to my point that I
think academia will be the last bastion of proprietary software...

Cheers,

Alex.