[Linux-aus] National Open Source Industry Cluster

[Anthony Towns]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 10:14:35AM +1000, Con Zymaris wrote:
> [please note cross-posting...]

[cross posted right back at ya]

> Specifically, what we have considered can be distilled into the following 
> core points of what such an organisation would do:
>  1) Focus primarily on thefor-profit aspects of Open Source. (We do not 
>  need, nor do we want to cross-over existing boundaries of organisations 
>  such as the state LUGs, Linux Australia, AUUG, SAGE-AU etc.)
>  2) Focus on business, government and educational sector adoption of FOSS
>  3) Focus on boosting member firms' ability to compete in the wider IT 
>  industry. (Most industry-cluster members are businesses.)
>  4) Act as a national co-ordinator for the various existing and 
>  forthcoming state-based Open Source industry clusters.

> There are probably other do's and don'ts, but we can debate these.

Sounds fair. What activities do you see the organisation doing? Organising
vendor-agnostic advertising programs? Maybe having a newsletter or
conference or similar focussed on non-technical open source issues
(issues like management, and advertising, licensing, fitting in with the
community without going non-profit, accounting, etc)? Holding a tradeshow?
Providing sample contracts and licenses and other legal advice for
hiring programmers to work on free software, or to work on proprietary
software without getting in the way of them doing free software hacking
at home? Having regular meetings and talks in capital cities? Something else?

I presume union-esque things (like providing assistance to hackers who're
getting screwed over by their employee) are out of scope (the members will be
the businesses doing the screwing over, no?).

Is there some particular list we should shift the discussion to?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

       ``Is this some kind of psych test?
                      Am I getting paid for this?''
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