[Linux-aus] Grant proposal: Software Freedom Day CDs for Australia

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 02:35, Mike Lampard <mike at mtgambier.net> wrote:
> In Mount Gambier at last years SFD we gave away maybe 100 CDs from memory,
> but we're just a little city of 26000, and we had virtually no advertising
> of the event.. Whether they were used or not I don't know, but surely
> Australia-wide we can disperse many more than 5000 over a year? Okay, so we
> have 2 or three major Events in a year and maybe not all are given out
> during these events, but if each usergroup has a stash of freebies to give
> away to interested parties then Software Freedom Day could/should be 365
> days a year.

Over 5000 nationally over the course of a year is easily doable. I'm merely 
talking about SFD itself, i.e. one day.

> As to the contents of the CD's, and I know I'm probably in a minority of
> one when I say this: Ubuntu may not be the ideal first look at Linux for a
> windows refugee imho, there are too many subtle differences due to
> gtk/gnomes' take on usability.  Why not a kde-based distro, even kubuntu
> would have fewer quirks I think which would ease the transition and give a
> better first impression.

That's a matter of intense debate, and placing LA in a role where it has to 
nominate one distro for the whole country for a year can make things awfully 
political. We already do this for single events, which is contentious enough.

But sometimes you just need to make a hard decision. Last year, SLUG held a 
day of tutorials for newbies. Common sense dictated that we standardise 
around one distro, and so we chose Ubuntu. We had numerous complaints from 
supporters of other distros, almost none of whom offered to lift a finger to 
help 'rectify' the situation.


-- 
"Not throwing out the baby with the bath-water doesn't mean that you cannot 
improve the system. I'm only arguing against stupid people who think they 
need a revolution to improve - most real improvements are evolutionary."
		- Linus Torvalds, 2002-12-05
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