On LWN dealing with Eric

On LWN dealing with Eric

Posted Jun 24, 2004 19:37 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: On LWN dealing with Eric by rgoates
Parent article: On dealing with Microsoft

Hi rgoates, I'm stuck for time, so this post is quite coarse. I'll follow this post up with a better one tomorrow.

The best thing you can do is to educate yourself. I have a small list of sources for digital freedom info. Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen are the two guys to look out for. The Wikipedia page on Eben Moglen has links to a lot of very interesting (and entertaining) talks he's given.

If there's no software freedom organisation in your area, set up a mailing list and get the word out. FSF or FSF Europe will happily do this for you. Twelve months ago in Ireland, there was no software freedom group, but I got a list set up and now it has 80 members. We're working on the software patents issue, the IP enforcement directive, the EU Copyright Directive, setting up conference stalls, organising talks etc.

People want to help, they don't know where to start. So make a starting point and ask for help, then people realise that they have some useful contacts, knowledge, etc. Collaboration works better for politics as well as software.

Think about giving talks. This could be a good way to get the info to the masses. Most college computer societies run series of amateur talks and will accept all offers. I'm not a "people person", but I started giving talks when I saw that no one was talking about software patents, I put my name down to give a talk. This had the benefit of educating a room full of people, but it also lit a fire under me to make sure I knew enough not to make a fool of myself.

hmmm, more tomorrow. Your post sounds a lot like me 3 years ago, and it more deserving of an essay than an LWN post.

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