[Ambassadors] Fedora project

Alejandro Acosta aacosta at fedoraproject.org
Wed Jul 23 15:52:59 UTC 2008


Hello Ambassador folks

I've been invited to participate at a little event in my Hometown State
University [1] this October , the main focus of the event would be free
software and I'm supposed to speak about the Fedora project. along other
participants including Richard Stallman !!!!. Personally I feel very honored
to share the same forum with Mr Stallman and when people ask me I always
answer that it is just as if you're learning to play piano and someone asks
you to perform along Mozart.

Anyway, I'm working on my presentation and looking through the ambassador's
resources I found Rahul's very illustrative and filled with a lot of helpful
information [2],  although it does not contain the most recent one. Can
anyone help me find the updated numbers? Other useful information will be
appreciated also.

My second point its a little more complicated since it implies philosophical
issues. Mr Stallman explains in his publications that it is not exact to use
the word "linux" to refer to an OS or a particular distro since Linux is
only the kernel and the rest of the OS is somehow derived from its original
work  (bash, editor, compilers, etc). [3]  Question: Do we at Fedora share
and honor this principle? Shall we refer to our and other distros as
GNU/Linux as he suggests?

Other thing that confuses me is that Stallman states that open source is a
motto of a movement that was formed as a reaction against the free software
movement.[4]  He even says that he refuses to participates in "open source"
or "linux" events  but he's willing to participate in events denominated
"Free Software  and Open Source? " or so as long as his speech is not the
main focus of the event.

I saw the words "open source" a lot along many Fedora presentations, but my
doubts still remain. Do we have any policy regarding Open Source and/or Free
Software?  It is going to be hard to me to debate about freedom against RMS
so I would prefer only to talk about our project, but stating clearly what
we stand for.

It is not my intention to start an even bigger internal debate within our
strong and happy community but it is to get some help in getting me clarify
these question.


Regards

Alejandro Acosta
Fedora Ambassador
Chihuahua, Mexico


PS The official name and dates of the event are not yet defined so this is
why I have not posted it in the events wiki, I hope I'll receive
confirmation within a few days



[1] http://www.uach.mx
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Presentations_Fedora_overview.pdf
[3] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html
[4] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
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