[Opencd-devel] Three Ideas

[Daniel M. <ma...@CS...>]

Hey.  I like this idea and plan to help out more when I have a bit of free
time.  Here are a couple of ideas I've came up with while watching the list
for the last few days.

One suggestion is that the CD contain a really well written, non-geeky,
non-anti-MS, introduction to the open source / free software movement.  It
should serve to discuss what open source is, that its not shareware, or
sampleware etc., that it is not piracy, that is (can be) of high quality,
etc.  I hope that this won't open up a whole can of worms (GPL vs BSD, RMS
vs ESR type of debate), which is why I don't think it has to get caught up
into all the specifics and nuances of licenses, but could just be a general
introduction.

I think it would be great if various Linux/Perl/BSD/etc. groups, especially
at schools, held some kind of event where these disks could be distributed,
demoed, etc.  It would be good if these groups could purchase the disks
cheaply (at cost), with nice slick labels on the disks.  The could burn them
themselves, but then the labels would not look as "professional".

I definitely think the command line tools, compilers, servers, etc. should
be left out.  This disk is supposed to be an intro to the world of open
source, not to Unix type systems, and should be geared towards the average
computer user.  This means applications and games.  Anyone who runs a
webserver, or is a software developer has at least heard of Apache or gcc
respectively.  The average user does not need those tools, and will only be
scared into thinking that OSS is just for "mad scientists" or "hackers" when
he sees cryptic command line tools.  We want to change the way they think
about software licenses, not how they compute.

Just a couple of suggestions.  Fire away...

Dan