[Edu-sig] Do you teach GNU?

[Jason Cunliffe]

Hi.

I've been following the sordid tale of SCOvs.IBM. I found two excellent
sites...

GROKLAW, a weblog cover legal matters "Putting some meat on legal news'
bones."
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/

and a superb wiki tracking the SCO scandal
http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SCOvsIBM

I am beginning to think the SCO debacle it will emerge as the best thing
which ever happened to OpenSource and GNU, because by the end of the affair
SCO will lose infamously. But also because corporate business, mainstream
media, and the courts will all finally understand the legal ethical and
programming issues. It's a little like how America learns Geography every
time it goes to war [ouch did I say that?].

Anyway, I am very curious to learn if those of you teaching/using Python in
schools also take time to discuss GNU and related topics with your students?

Stories comments reaction most welcome..

>From a cultural perspective GPL may be one of the most important pieces of
programming ever done. Certainly it is Stallman's great hack, one for the
history and law books.

GPL: The GNU General Public License
www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL

"In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to
redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the
freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom.
So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we ``copyleft'' it.
Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without
changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft
guarantees that every user has freedom."

GPL is not all, but it is the original mountain from which the other
collaborative licenses flow and define themselves.

thanks
Jason
______________________________________________
Jason Cunliffe [NOMADICS: Director art+design]
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