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Hello everybody! I should invite people and encourage them to use Fedora, however, there are forbidden items I should avoid to talk about: [quote] You really should not be directing people to copyright infringing code with your Fedora Ambassador hat on. This means, that with the exception of what we provide in Fedora Core, or Fedora Extras, you are not to be telling people to go and get other 3rd party applications (that can read their PDFs better, or play their illegal MP3 music). Pointing them to a resource like Google, or the FedoraFAQ might be a good idea, but don't send them to a third-party repository. [/quote] If I respect this rule, I will lose users. Most of my friends and people I meet don't (or did not) know anything about Fedora, and if I tell them "google for this", this won't help me a lot. I explain: In Tunisia, piracy is not a tabu thing: there're no "digital" laws, and even if there are, they are not seriously respected. Thus, anyone can get CD's of Windows, Office, Adobe and Macromedia softwares, development environment (Visual Studio and so), etc. All this stuff for less than $10! This is not really clandestine, since you may find in Tunis hundreds of shops where it's written "gravure logiciels pour 1 dinar". What I wanted to say, is that "restrictions" and fairness won't convert curious and hesitating people; besides, if they have to use Linux, they automatically choose Mandriva and SuSe: they like their interfaces! Here are some frequent answers when I talk about restrictions in Fedora: "Why do I have to care about USA? Do I seem to live there? They even refused to me a student visa" "With Linux, I can't play my favorite games, do you want me to forget my favorite music too?" "If you offer me an OGG player, then I will convert all my MP3's to OGG" "It's the first time that I legally get a DVD, and I'm not allowed to watch it?""I paid $500 for this camera, I want at least to watch scenes I made" There are more serious ones: "I use J2E for living; if I migrate from Windows, then I have to find Sun's Java on the other OS"
I can't say that I haven't broken this condition; yes, I did, otherwise, people would not accept to install Fedora: I have a CD containing only a tarball archive and a bash script, if you execute the script, it will install everything missing in /usr/local , and I admit it's one of the points that made me succeed to promote and spread Fedora around friends and people asking for help. I'm not doing a mea culpa, but I think that I have to inform Fedora ambassadors about my infraction, if you may call it so. Nothing is illegal anyway: There's no law here that prohibits using MP3; besides, according to the licenses, I'm allowed to copy and distribute the non open source softwares "as is". What do you think, dear ambassadors, and what ideas do you suggest? Attracting people, event if they are not that serious, or sermonizing, which makes them escape?
-- You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -- Albert Einstein
ambassadors@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Wassim K.