| |||||||||||
A trip to LinuxWorld San Francisco 2003A trip to LinuxWorld San Francisco 2003Posted Aug 14, 2003 17:52 UTC (Thu) by gleef (guest, #1004)In reply to: A trip to LinuxWorld San Francisco 2003 by josh_stern Parent article: A trip to LinuxWorld San Francisco 2003
Josh_stern asks: I talked to the IRS guy at LinuxWorld. Apparently, the IRS feels that many businesses have either poor access to the Internet or restrict access to most of their employees. In response, the IRS has an outreach program, where they send people to business conventions and offer these CD's so that businesses can make the full array of tax forms available to their employees without having to worry about internet connectivity. It seems that whoever made the list of conventions to set up an IRS booth at had little to no understanding of GNU/Linux or LinuxWorld Expo, and didn't realize that the CD would not be appropriate and would be widely mocked. The guy manning the booth had gotten a lot of people demanding that he justify his presence (I suspect more than Microsoft got last year when they debuted their LinuxWorld booth), many were curious but I got the impression that some were angry and abusive. By the time I talked to him on Wednesday, he was very frustrated, but still in good spirits. I suspect they won't be back next year, but regardless I wish A) Large organizations put at least some thought into the conventions they attend, and B) That people, and this includes people in the Linux/Free Software/Open Source Software communities, have got to learn some manners. It wasn't the poor guy in the booth's fault that the IRS sent him, or that the CD had no Linux goodies on it. I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad that LinuxWorld Expo is now considered "another business technology convention" by some people, but there certainly was a lot of emphasis on business technology and very little on Free software, or even software development in general.
(Log in to post comments)
|
|||||||||||