'Til All Are One

Two weeks ago, we had the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-​​ordinator of the Linux Aus­tralia stand:

Edu­ca­tion Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rose­hill Race­course, Sydney

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is an annual trades show tar­geted towards the K-​​12 edu­ca­tional space. Vis­it­ors con­sist of fam­il­ies and edu­cat­ors. Linux Aus­tralia once again had a stand, with volun­teers spread­ing the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very suc­cess­ful. With each passing year, the level of aware­ness of FOSS notice­ably improves. Whereas at pre­vi­ous shows we would spend much energy expound­ing the basic con­cepts of FOSS/​Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Fire­fox and Open​Of​fice​.org.

One thing we did dif­fer­ently this year was place more focus on FOSS run­ning on Win­dows. Our past efforts have been meet with some res­ist­ance, as installing a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem posed a bar­rier to entry that many would not sur­mount. We had plenty of cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc to dis­trib­ute, in addi­tion to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Edu­ca­tion is migrat­ing over 40,000 PCs across the state to Open​Of​fice​.org was a use­ful selling point as well.

Our mar­ket­ing efforts have been improv­ing with each event. Our mes­sage is becom­ing more refined, and our leaf­lets are becom­ing more rel­ev­ant. On the tech­nical side, FOSS is becom­ing easier and more access­ible, with pro­jects such the afore­men­tioned OpenE­duca­tionDisc and Wubi lead­ing the way.

Our Web pres­ence is improv­ing, too. It’s far easier to point a new­bie to just one easy-​​to-​​remember URL instead of con­fus­ing them with a list. In addi­tion, I built an edu­ca­tion portal for Linux Aus­tralia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-​​friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demon­strat­ing their Web-​​based soft­ware product on about ten com­puters, all of which were run­ning Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other high­lights of our pres­ence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Aus­tralia)
• Intel Class­mate PCs (from Man­driva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops show­ing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some pho­tos of the event.

A big thanks to every­one who helped at the stand:

• Ash­ley Lynn
• Ash­ley Maher
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Har­rison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A spe­cial thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instru­mental in ensur­ing the suc­cess of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD: Insur­ance com­pany bets health on open source — I’m quite heav­ily involved in this pro­ject, so need­less to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

Bill Gates was inter­viewed by the BBC’s Money Pro­gramme. As he pre­pares to sig­ni­fic­antly reduce his dir­ect work for Microsoft Cor­por­a­tion, Bill reflects upon what got him star­ted in the first place and what kept him ahead of the ‘com­pet­i­tion’. The video provides a brief glimpse into the char­ac­ter that foun­ded and guided Microsoft. Regard­less of whether you love him or hate him, he is indeed a fas­cin­at­ing character.

Skip ahead to the 40 second mark, to the seg­ment titled “How the teen­age Gates and his friend Paul Allen got access to a com­puter”. The story accord­ing to Gates was that he and his friends were allowed to hack on a company’s com­puter “like mon­keys” at night to find bugs. He spent hours read­ing manu­als and exper­i­ment­ing to fig­ure out this “fas­cin­at­ing puzzle”. How­ever, they were stuck at the “tinker­ing” stage until they stumbled across the source code in a rub­bish bin. It was only then could the mon­keys evolve.

I don’t think the pro­du­cers of the show real­ised the sig­ni­fic­ance of this admis­sion, since they quickly cut to another seg­ment. Read­ing between the lines, Gates is essen­tially con­fess­ing that he would not have pro­gressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this know­ledge, and without this oppor­tun­ity to under­stand and exper­i­ment with how the intern­als of a com­puter worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely con­strained in their abil­ity to found a soft­ware com­pany and develop products

I would go so far as to say that Microsoft owes its very exist­ence to this access to source code.

To any­one with a passing famili­ar­ity to how things worked back then, this comes as no sur­prise. Source code was expec­ted to be free, and this in turn nur­tured a gen­er­a­tion of com­puter hack­ers. But whereas Richard Stall­man saw the amaz­ing poten­tial of this free­dom and wanted to pre­serve it for all, Bill Gates appears to have per­ceived it as an advant­age for him­self that he must deny to others.

LotD:  Gates memo shows user frustration

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is on this week­end. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our help­ers. The second one con­tains some advice that would work well in many situ­ations regard­ing FOSS (espe­cially where mar­ket­ing is con­cerned), so I’ll repro­duce it (slightly edited) here:

Sub­ject: Edu­ca­tion Expo, this week­end!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan <sridhar@​dhanapalan.​com>
To: SLUG Activ­it­ies <activities@​slug.​org.​au>

Thanks again to every­one who has volun­teered to help with the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Sat­urday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for fam­il­ies with chil­dren in the K-​​12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rose­hill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime pos­i­tion right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the ori­ginal announce­ment and the Edu­ca­tion Expo Web site.

I asked in my pre­vi­ous mes­sage if people could tell me when they would be avail­able to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Sat­urday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and prob­ably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assist­ance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear com­fort­able cas­ual cloth­ing. It might get hot in the exhib­i­tion hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed cloth­ing, wear that
• Wear com­fort­able shoes. You’ll be stand­ing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talk­ing to stand vis­it­ors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to vis­it­ors that there is a vibrant FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia, and espe­cially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Fri­day of every month (next meet­ing on 27 June). SLUG has a seg­ment known as ‘SLUG­lets’, which is inten­ded for newbies.

Famil­i­ar­ise your­self with the leaf­lets that we will distribute:

• http://​link​pot​.net/​r​a​v​i​n​es/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​d​e​t​h​r​o​ne/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​t​r​e​m​o​l​os/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) and FOSS in edu­ca­tion. Remem­ber to pro­mote these to stand vis­it­ors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://​linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux
• http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion

One import­ant point to remem­ber is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be hand­ing out cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, which is a CD full of education-​​oriented FOSS for Win­dows. Not every­one is able to switch over to Linux cold-​​turkey, but we can get them star­ted with FOSS on Win­dows first.

Sim­il­arly, open stand­ards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of pro­pri­et­ary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and pro­mote in their stead open altern­at­ives such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t real­ise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Fire­fox and Open­Of­fice are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. The NSW Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is in the pro­cess of switch­ing over >40,000 school com­puters to OpenOffice.
• Wiki­pe­dia is built around the idea of open know­ledge, inspired dir­ectly from the FOSS move­ment (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many import­ant com­pon­ents based on FOSS, such as the ker­nel, file shar­ing, print­ing and the Web browser.
• About two-​​thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web com­pan­ies (like Google, Face­book and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is nor­mal for Hol­ly­wood films to be cre­ated using Linux.
• Linux is pre­val­ent in a range of con­sumer devices.
• The pop­u­lar ASUS Eee PC, and many of its com­pet­it­ors, come with Linux pre-​​installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Win­dows applic­a­tion that installs Ubuntu as a file without par­ti­tion­ing the hard drive. It behaves like a nor­mal dual-​​boot sys­tem, but it can be unin­stalled from ‘Add/​Remove Pro­grams’ just like any Win­dows applic­a­tion. We’ll also have cop­ies of Edubuntu. Remem­ber that this is an add-​​on com­pan­ion, not a stand-​​alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While noth­ing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excel­lent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-​​aid’ solu­tions like anti-​​virus and anti-​​spyware soft­ware because the soft­ware was built sanely to begin with. The Inter­net was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for fam­il­ies. It’s afford­able and reli­able. It won’t get infec­ted and show unso­li­cited porn adverts to your chil­dren. There are heaps of great edu­ca­tional soft­ware install­able with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a com­munity stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unne­ces­sary Microsoft-​​bashing. We’re run­ning the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Form­ing a sec­tion of the much lar­ger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source tech­no­lo­gies and solu­tions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Aus­tralia and Open Source Industry Aus­tralia.

In the mar­ket, FOSS is clearly matur­ing and becom­ing more main­stream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answer­ing basic ques­tions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any ques­tions like that at all. Most people knew some­thing about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some dir­ec­tion to get started.

We had much interest in com­munity and gen­eral usage at the Linux Aus­tralia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were pop­u­lar. Of immense pop­ular­ity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Aus­tralia. Vis­it­ors were genu­inely inter­ested in the units, and I didn’t hear any neg­at­ive feed­back at all. I do believe that a lot of people did under­stand that this is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject for chil­dren in the devel­op­ing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Aus­tralia stand, I spoke to many people who were inter­ested in deploy­ing FOSS solu­tions to solve spe­cific prob­lems. Many of these people would not have con­sidered FOSS in the past, so clearly our mes­sage is resonating.

Com­ing up in a couple of weeks (June 14–15) is the Edu­ca­tion Expo. We’ve always been suc­cess­ful there, and all signs point to us repeat­ing that.

LotD: MacGyver is favour­ite dis­aster hero