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Re: The Palo Alto Tea Party



Hi,

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Ira Abramov wrote:

> What is the situation in academic sites in Israel these days? Is Netware
> still around? In the US, every time Microsoft signs a big agreement with a
> famous university, or worse, as lately, with the state of texas' board of
> education and the UC network in California, there is always a wave of
> protests from students' homepages, through OSS, Linux and antimicrosoft
> sites. Is stuff like that happening in Israel? and if so, who is
> protesting?

Well, at HUJI Linux is still a foreign concept, but that is
mainly due to policy decisions. But the main issue is,
of course, lacking Hebrew support that drives everybody to MS arms. That
especially when it comes to student systems where most students won't be
happy not to be able to write Hebrew in almost any application. In other
places (like Germany), in many universities Linux replaced all other
brands of Unix and also most MS products (notably uni-tuebingen.de, a
Linux stronghold) and we can only hope that together with Unicode also
this problem will be mended (I personally don't see much future in the
ASCII system where you can't mix, say, English, Hebrew, Russian & German
in one font). 

I tried protesting but just got above answer :-(


> snipped a lot of great SVLUG stuff

well, critical mass is it all. How many active "freak" members are there
in SVLUG ? 100 ? 1000 ? 10000 ? Compare that to the 250-300 list members
WE have, and most of them silent most of the time. Also, how is the
age/occupation breakdown at SVLUG as compared to us ?

> If linux-il would have done 10% of that, I would have been satisfied, but
> frankly, the only events we organize 2-3 times a year are not marked by
> great activism, I guess it's just not the critical mass yet... I know that
> I, for one, will try to organize lectures and such when I come back
> (dinners and their arrangments are frankly a pain in the /dev/out to plan,
> and don't have much usefull effect). I'm willing to teach about Samba, and
> would love another guy to teach me back about X Gnome, and I'm sure lots
> of people out there are interested to hear about mod_perl and PHP/3.
> 
> what do you say, guys?

We are trying, it's just so hard Ira ...

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