Novell Removed from List of National Free Software Conference Sponsors?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2008-11-18 12:18:06 UTC
Modified: 2008-11-18 14:24:31 UTC
ON A COUPLE of occasions earlier this week, the protest against Novell in India got highlighted [1, 2]. As one blogger pointed out, the conference will be remembered for quite some time (internationally even) because of this incident, which is likely to deter prospective Novell customers. It's actually interesting that yesterday alone this Web site gauged about 600,000 hits, which is a lot more than usual. We're actually surprised that the server managed to stay up and serve pages.
We were not able to confirm this, but one reader told us that the action was a success in the sense that Novell won't participate in this "Free software" conference. Videos are beginning to appear as well, so here's a couple.
This action was also covered in several big sites and the father of the Free software movement commended the effort. Some more coverage appears here, in addition to a lot of blogs. According to Savio over at InfoWorld (IDG), these actions were a lot more effective than the activists probably realise.
[W]hat I find more interesting are the calls to boycott Novell, Suse, and Microsoft products in India.
It's about about word of mouth. It changes perceptions and passes from mouth to ear. ⬆
There's no guarantee that writing the truth will result in an audience (or readership), but over time - in the long run - people generally gravitate towards what they know or feel to be crude truth, not just what's comforting (albeit false or self-deluding, usually groupthink dictated from above)
Democracy depends on free press and freedom of the press depends on being able to safely publish (and keep available) material that bad people don't want to be known to anybody
The Web is really getting bad; it's also overwhelmed by fake material or plagiarised material, wherein the plagiarism gets disguised/hidden by LLM sausage factories
