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. ⬆
they say there's no free lunch; if you aren't paying for hosting and serving of "your" videos, you're not the customer and those videos, once uploaded, aren't quite yours anymore
This past summer Richard M. Stallman (RMS) openly complained in a public event that the term "security" had come to mean all sorts of ridiculous things, including the very oppose of real security
In the long run, this site and its sister site (less overlap between them now) should hopefully become a popular destination for people who look for information, not chaff