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GNU is Not Unix Linux Business

Thawte Founder Launches Open Source Campaign 91

Posted by Hemos from the pushing-for-acceptance dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth ? , lauched a campaign to increase the use of open-source software in South Africa, according to the Sunday Times. The GO-open source campaign is aimed at households and small businesses. Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting in 1995 and subsequently sold it to Verisign for $575 Million."
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Thawte Founder Launches Open Source Campaign More

Thawte Founder Launches Open Source Campaign

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  • Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dogers ( 446369 ) * on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:42AM (#9107313)
    .. but looks to bre premature to me?

    "I want to give it a try" comes up with "send us your name and address and we'll send you a CD!"

    How about whats on this CD, a more useful (other than the little thats in the FAQ's) list of links on where to stay/get up to date with your software, etcetc?
    • Aah how first world of us to think everyone in the world has a fat pipe running into their homes : )

      I presume since this is a South Africa specific initiative it makes sense mailing them (the "I want to give it a try" folk) the cds but I agree a download option wouldn't hurt!

      Also what does the CD contain, really how can the site be of any value if they won't tell the people who want to try OSS what comes on the CD and how is it useful to the users!?!
      • Just for the sake of everybody who live in countried where bandwidth are are cheap and available in large quantities. In South Africa we (finally) have ADSL. Thanks to our general shortage of international bandwith (and the telco's pathetic disinterest in doing anything about it), it performs more like a dual ISDN for international traffic, on a good day. Also, we are limited to 3GB of traffic per month, after wich it performs like a 9600baud modem, on a good day. So, downloading ISO images is difficult
    • When I first saw the header I thought to myself 'man, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.

      Ouch! Then I RTFA and I felt like I had been stabbed in the throat AGAIN!

      Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!

      Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this?
      Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?

      I honestly don't

      • Re:Throatgestabben! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mav[LAG] ( 31387 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @02:27PM (#9108965)
        Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!

        Then let me try and be so in return...

        Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this? Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?

        Well, Andy Grove did in his book Only The Paranoid Survive. Probably the most famous quote in there was this one:
        "If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry."

        Sounds like a spot-on prediction to me. Bear in mind that this was published in 1996 which shows you just how much insight he had back then.

        I honestly don't envision the long term effects of this as 'a good thing'. Jesus H. Christ - how's this for an idea : how about I go to some third world country where the wage scales make Indian off-shore wages look like a king's ransom and teach all the indigenous inhabitants how to be 'computer guys'.

        Sounds good. Nothing like a bit of volunteer work to get your worldviews really in perspective :)

        These guys would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and a chicken, just envision what they would do for $2/hr.

        Surprisingly, most people in the third world (where I live) want the same as you: to be left alone, to have food on the table, roofs over their heads and satisfying work to do to earn money.

        Anybody that thinks their long term employment prospects are bad now, just wait until this little project comes to fruition.

        I don't see how - the campaign is promoting the use and development of open source software. Anyone in the world who uses it will benefit.
        The real problem for US tech workers right now is that globalisation has caught up with you where it hurts and I would be lying if that word shadenfreude hasn't occurred to me more than once recently. For many years, the globalisation mantra has benefited few economies outside the US. It's going to be good for your economy in the long run like making it more competitive for a start :)

        Plenty of us outside the US (I am South African for the record) have seen this coming for ages, especially in the FLOSS arena where no-one cares where you're from as long as your code is clean and works. Outsourcing of development and support to skilled markets outside the US was just the next step - and it's happening.

        My first impressions were probably right, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.

        He could have but he chose instead to put money back into the open source community.
        • Don't get me wrong, I'm just bitter.
          That said, lets play 'Envision'.

          Envision that the world likes Diamonds. Not hard to envision.

          Envision that over the past 30 years Africa had been the sole supplier of Diamonds to the world, had been able to command high prices and for whatever reason built a massive infrastructure to protect the country from invasion, to provide healthy food and water to everybody, to insure that everyone had their medical needs met, to insure that it evolved into a country of laws and
          • Envision that the world likes Diamonds. Not hard to envision. ..snip..

            *Nod*, excellent analogy.

            In order for the demand for programming labor to even exist (locally or globally), a massive infrastructure (and tax base) must exist and be continually paid for - for the tech world, most of it in the USA.

            Historically, there's no doubt the world has benefited from the explosion in the tech industry driven by the US. Without cheap hardware and bandwidth and the culture of innovation (real innovation I mean -
      • Karma be damned! Screw you for being an ignoramus thinking any human being would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and chicken. You stupid and insensitive MotherFucker. Slavery was forced on Africans by Europeans and Americans. Stop trying to re-write history and saying slaves were sold into slavery by their brothers.
    • What you must realise is that this campaign has little to do with OSS people - it is aimed at people who have never heard of OSS and even at people who don't have computers yet. If they can remove MS as the dfault in peoples minds and replace it with OSS then OSS can go a long way. They are also talking to a largely IT illiterate population who will learn quicker by trying than by reading the philosophies of OSS! If you also think that simply giving away CD's is their only tool with an R18m budget then yo

    • The saddest thing about Shuttleworth's Go-Opensource [go-opensource.co.za] is that is makes no effort to indicate (or show respect for) any Free Software or Open Source foundation, or to acknowledge any of the (many) other South African initiatives that have been promoting OSS over the years.

      Although the FAQ provides links to the Free Software Philosophy and the Open Source definition, there are no links to the home pages of gnu.org or opensource.org. In short, this "promotional campaign" doesn't even indicate where you can f

  • Wow... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 )
    I haven't seen that everything2 superscript questionmark on Slashdot in a long time.

    Why did it go away, anyway?
    • In this case, there were actually no writeups in the Mark Shuttleworth node, so I don't think we should have seen the question mark. Oh well.
    • It's not so much that everything2 went it's that wikipedia arrived...

      E2 is mostly OK. It had some performance, downtime and community issues that took time to resolve. It's sitting under my desk at the moment ;-)

  • it'd help (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:46AM (#9107359)
    if it rendered properly under a gecko browser.... but I suppose that isn't the target audience right?

  • Good publicity can't hurt (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Inhibit ( 105449 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:46AM (#9107361) Homepage Journal
    Spending R18 million (if I knew what the "R" was I'd convert it) on open source advertising can't hurt. I'd think funding local open source outfits with startup capital and training would probably go farther though. All the pretty advertisements in the world aren't going to help you get your Fedora Desktop running correctly when there's a kernel bug.

  • Bad moderation (Score:4, Funny)

    by texasandroid ( 692557 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:47AM (#9107367)
    I selected the wrong moderation choice on a post and am posting this to kill that moderation. I ask other moderators to have mercy, and not mod me off-topic, but instead just let this post languish at it's default level.

  • Everything2 sucks (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:49AM (#9107379)
    Use this link instead: Mark Shuttleworth [wikipedia.org].

  • And he likes slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GPLDAN ( 732269 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:53AM (#9107421)
    In his Bio [markshuttleworth.com] he lists Slashdot as one of his likes.

    He sold Thwate for $575M. Damn, outside of the guy who founded Hotmail and actually walked away from a Microsoft $300M offer, holding out until he got something like $500M, this is the 2nd most impressive dot-com startup guy I've heard about. That's amazing.
  • A very nice gentleman recently contacted me about transferring some funds out of Africa as well.

  • Related Link (Score:3, Informative)

    by CompWerks ( 684874 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:54AM (#9107430)
    http://www.markshuttleworth.com/ [markshuttleworth.com]

  • we've /.ed e2 (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Triv ( 181010 )
    As much as I've missed the e2 linkage over here, was it really such a good idea to put it in a slashdot story what with all the server problems we've been having over there? I mean geez, guys, I think you just slashdotted e2. Nate do something to piss you off, or what?

    Triv

  • ouch (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by proj_2501 ( 78149 )
    Thank you for slashdotting e2. Now I can actually get some work done.
  • that's south african rand, i think ZAR is the symbol

  • South Africa (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aNTee-KrUsT ( 634960 )

    We here in ZA has seen a lot of integration of open source everywhere, even our own government [oss.gov.za] supports it. Another shuttleworth [meraka.org.za] link.

    "What resolution is life running at"

  • Just for the Record (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pope Raymond Lama ( 57277 ) <<gwidion> <at> <mpc.com.br>> on Monday May 10, 2004 @01:47PM (#9108528) Homepage
    This sane Mike Shuttleworth offered, about 2 months ago, some funding for The Gimp [gimp.org], and two of the current developers made a deal with him to be paid to further GEGL [gegl.org] (Generic Graphical Library) development and integration with the GIMP.

    GEGL, once fully implemented, and integrated to The GIMP core, will finally allow it to use images with higher color depths than 8 bit per plane.
  • I've been in touch with the OSS people at the Shuttleworth Foundation about distributing TheOpenCD [sunsite.dk]. They may have made some modifications (as they are free to do). Thomas Black of the foundation even helped us squash some last minute bugs. Thanks :)

  • I was going to say it's the Thawte that counts (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    but for all I know the name may rhyme with "Naughty." Any pronounciation guide for those of us who are clueless?
  • I'm often surprised that a company that's been around on the internet this long and with this high a profile gets so misspelt.

    I never met Mark Shuttleworth but was always sure he was a spot-on bloke. (Can you imagine e-mailing the CEO of Verisign and actually getting a personal reply? That's how it used to be back in the 90's when Thawte was a close number 2 to Verisign worldwide and Mark was running it.)

    But to get back to my point, I was curious myself and a few years ago asked Mark why chose the word "T

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