There is much more to Open Source than just the code. In the OSS ecosystem, there are many opportunities for different people with different talents and resources to play a role. During our open source awards ceremony earlier in the year, we honoured a number of individuals (Kenyans) who have played a role in the global OSS community. We have Kenyans with projects on source forge, we have Kernel engineers like Benard who played a major role in the development of Asianux, among others. This event was the first and its intention was to encourage Kenyans to play a larger role in the global Open Source community. Rad, I know that you guys earning their bread in the proprietary industry have a right to do so. I respect all of you. But I also know that from your camp you have as much vile against OSS as we do against proprietary. Take the article in the Nation the other day about MS and Cisco "assisting" local schools with technology. This is merely a self-serving marketing gimmick to perpetuate themselves and entrench their technologies in the minds of the young students. Vendor lock-in per excellence. This is what makes us lag behind in producing enough guys who can play a wider role in open source because all the teaching and training in schools and institutions of higher learning is done on donated proprietary software. There you have it. Evans On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:17 PM, Gakuru Alex <alexgakuru.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:07 PM, saidimu apale <saidimu@gmail.com> wrote:
I once asked the same question to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's "benevolent dictator" ( the occasion was UbuntuBelowZero developer preparations for Ubuntu 6.04). I'd noticed that 99.9% of the developers in the room were white so I asked him how it was that an "African" distro (as it was being marketed then) had virtually no African developers.
I have never considered nor confined Open Source to "code contributors." _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general