Six Degrees of Free Software
I was messing about before my Data Structures class today when the guy in front of me mentioned to the person next to him that he had written his assignment under Linux and needed to make sure it would compile using Visual Studio in Windows. I (unashamedly) interjected “What distribution of Linux are you using?” “Ubuntu,” he replied, “I installed the base server packages and then put kubuntu-desktop on top of that.” I mentioned that I did some work for Ubuntu, so I was always happy to see someone using it. Then I found out that he was Joshua Gay, who does some work for the FSF, including editing 2 of rms’ last 3 books (for example this one). He’s a graduate student who went to Massachusetts for his undergrad. It was interesting to hear him talk about rms and mako and other big names in the free-software world as people he’d actually met and talked to, rather than seen as screennames on #ubuntu or such.
Having come from out east, where Linux and Free Software are perhaps more common household words, Josh really wanted to increase and encourage free software use here at OU. It would be terribly interesting to get an organization started…