[Fsf-friends] MS' influence redux

[Joe Steeve]

"balachandran c" <balachandran_c@rediffmail.com> writes:
> We could use the {horse, cart} analogy here?? Shouldn't we try
> to get the students onboard first? Is it that difficult to get
> students' attention? Maybe we could sponsor an FS based event in
> college Tech. meets. Students will be looking around for
> interesting things, and they can find stuff about FS for
> themselves.

No this is _not_ difficult and is being done in many places. May
be not as a `FSF India sponsored/backed` event, but as a self
interest activity. Voluteers do conduct sessions and colleges and
schools. 

The reason why the FS community is bothered about the activities
of MS in schools and colleges is that they never talk the
truth. They never go and tell, what parts of their technology is
patented before teaching them to the students. They would call
their `shared source license` as a `open source license`. They
practice cheap business tricks with the student community. The
student community (especially in india) is very much vulnerable to
this because of the lack of availability of resources., and the
lack of awareness. 

A number of colleges in TamilNadu are so bent on just the
placement count. They'd do anything for the company which promises
to recruit half of their students. Infection of engineering
syllabus happens in almost every autonomous college. 

> Are people neglecting the "attention first, ideology later"
> option because they think it is on the wrong side of "ends /
> means" argument? Is it considered too *ahem* inappropriate to be
> discussed on this list?

Hmm., the problem with this is that., people `create the
attention` but fail to do the phase two., the ideology. They are
happy with the results of phase 1 and hence the result wears
off, or ends up as not useful to the community. A person who uses
`linux` all day and does not want to acknowledge the `gnu` in it,
is just no different from any other windows user.

-- 
.O. A proud GNU user
..O http://www.joesteeve.tk/
OOO http://joe.bsdnerds.org/
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