Think, for a moment, about what the free software community looks like from the external gaze. “Bloody Communists” - I’ve never actually had a businessman say this to me when I’ve been explaining free software, but I’m sure they’ve thought it. I suppose the smarter ones might have thought “anarcho-syndicalists”. Choosing to use free software may be simply economic, but contributing to any such project is surely a political statement.

So what is this statement? I’m not the person to write your statement, but I can offer mine.

The free and open source software community has witnessed, over and over again, how far a visit to the right government officials can go. Bill Gates seems to know the game, and what cards he should play in every occasion to “make things happen”.

Over the last few years, it was apparent to us that making good software and creating good standards was just not enough to fight such a strong political presence. How could the free and open source world fight this?

Here is the proposal, in a nutshell (for the lazy readers): creating a fund aimed at informing government officials and prime ministers in the world about free software, and making sure that they receive similar benefits as they would if they chose to push for a Microsoft contract.

This is a slightly different post this week. I haven’t found anything of technical note to talk about and only discovered some of the power of Ruby on Rails this week, but have not had the chance to explore it much, but on the surface it looks awesome.

What I did discover while checking things out in cyberspace is three interesting open source models for different areas. War, politics and religion. Just the stuff we like to discuss at the dinner table. No doubt there are many blogs on open source sex, but that’s a dinner table conversation I’m not going to cover today.

If, for whatever reason, you have done some digging on me you will have discovered a dark secret. Well, not quite a secret as I do not hide it, nor is it that dark, more of a information non publiée.

Bruce Byfield of Linux.com has a great editorial up about Why FOSS isn’t on activist agendas. Bruce points out that although FOSS enthusiasts are great at discussing their “shared values” within their own niche, they’re not very good at reaching out to the broader community—particularly folks over 40 who tend to be more active and influential in politics than the under 30 “techie” crowd:

My previous blog, Pay a little now, pay a lot later, generated a lot more traffic than I expected. Lots. As a consequence, it was seen by many people who probably aren’t as familiar with certain aspects of free software as my normal target audience. This led to several misunderstandings.