It's 0235 now. I am sitting at the sofa trying my best to finish up my slides for tomorrow's SELinux in a Nutshell talk. Maybe I shouldn't agreed to do it in the first place. Ah well....so a moment of temporary insanity will cost me another sleepless night; nothing new there.
The MSC Open Source Conference will begin in a few hours. I will be manning the OpenSUSE install desk on the first day and will generally be doing everything OpenSUSE for the rest of the conference. Exiciting indeed. And man what a rush! So much effort has been made by MDEC for us community people. We are not exactly the easiest people to get along with; or perhaps we tick and dance to a different rhythm than what they are used to. The fact that MDEC, a "Windows-soaked" organisation is willing to engage us is nothing short of a worthy standing ovation.
Open source has always been unfairly made out to be a fringe movement, populated by narcissists and anti-social types. Somehow, there are many who feel that if you are not using Windows there must be something seriously wrong with you. A rebel without a cause.
Well, come tomorrow we are gonna knock their socks off with the sheer power of what the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world has to offer. For perhaps the very first time, a Malaysian FOSS event was given a slot in a televised breakfast show and a radio interview. That's mainstream exposure. With MDEC spearheading the task of organising the conference, it adds "legitimacy" to FOSS. Suddenly if MDEC is looking at FOSS, then to the rest of the Windows dependent people, there must be something FOSS than meets the eye. They will begin to see it in a more deserving positive light.
And now back to my slides.
2 comments:
To be true I know nothing about linux, day to day as MS user until a day where a day few years back someone in Usenet urged me to try linux as another option in addition of MS. Those were the days Fedora Core 1 is about to release, the enthusiasm into linux started therewith. Starting to know KDE in SUSE Linux PRO 9.1 (before openSUSE were fully implemented by Novell).
Words like "lagi senang guna Windows...." are to be expected always when we try to introduce linux, luckily we are taking about more user friendly distro such as SUSE, if we are trying introduce to such as more conservative linux i.e Debian or Slackware, I believe they will say "I'd rather use a calculator...."
Lagi senang is dependent bro. Like I find Macs can be intimidating to noobs. Many yuppie or wannabes always swear by Mac not becoz of anything but the cool factor.
It is also sad to know that many of the people who rant against Linux and OSS are the so called techies, people who by nature should be inquisitive and be excited by new tech.
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