[Fsf-friends] sly stories

[Ramanraj K]

  Praveen A wrote:

>Check out this site
>
>www.slynux.co.nr
>
Dear Praveen,

It is pointless for us to go into all the claims made there about some 
new "Operating System".  Debian and Knoppix have made the task of 
creating new distros so easy, that we may get to read about new born 
babies creating new distros by kicking on keyboards with their tender 
feet :)

The www.slynux.co.nr site says this

<quote> 
We provide you the best customer service as we can. This is a free 
software provider. We give you different and different software. We 
release software per month. The latest software we released is SL E- 
PeriodicTable.(See products). Our slogan is technology changes day by 
day. So the software will become free software. You should write to me 
about our site and products. You can freely install demo version of the 
software from downloads. After installing you will get serial number 
from the author, SarathLakshman by a request e-mail.
</quote>

When I tried to clip the above quote, a stern javascrip alert said I 
could not even view source code of the html page! That is obviously 
cripple ware distributed without source code, and certainly not free 
software. Ten year olds or 10th standard kids may  get away with all 
this as part of learning or having fun, but it is not the kind of 
example we could cite or recommend.  

It only proves again that we need a curriculum at schools that explains 
the free software philosophy in a manner the students can understand, so 
that they become responsible users, and if possible, make sensible 
contributions to the community.

Regards,
Ramanraj.