Felton, California Residents Eschew Proprietary Software

by Sam Dean - Aug. 12, 2008Comments (3)

It takes a village? How about a whole city? How about 100 cities? I enjoyed this item from LinuxInsider about residents of Felton, California who pledged to go proprietary software-free for at least a week. If you've ever been to Felton, which has a Santa Cruz-like countercultural flavor, this pledge makes sense. Felton isn't alone, though. As LinuxInsider reports, similar plans are in place for towns in Oregon and New Mexico, and 100 towns in Italy.

To prepare residents of Felton for going cold turkey, there were three weeks of town meetings and installfests, targeted at teaching them Linux and more. July 28th was when the experiment officially started. Larry Cafiero, with HeliOS Solutions West, has a long post about Felton's "Lindependence Day" on the Ubuntu forums. He says:

"I expect that most of the people who participate in this project will continue to stay "proprietary free" after the week is over, because they will discover what we already know: Linux, FOSS and the freedom to choose in our digital pursuits far outweigh the digital hegemony provided by the digital mandarins in Redmond and Cupertino."

There is also this call-to-arms site from the Felton FOSS Folks. It features a chainsaw-wielding depiction of Tux the penguin.

We've covered strong efforts from leaders in the EU to encourage government use of open source software before. We've also covered the U.S. Navy's similar efforts. At the municipal level, maybe one way to expand the reach of open source is to identify the many communities that might get a kick out of adopting it.


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3 Comments
 

Thanks, Sam, for your blog entry. I would like to point out a couple of things to make things a little more streamlined.

First, the "call to arms" folks should be directed to http://www.lindependence.net. Also, the Ubuntu forum post stemmed from trying to the California Ubuntu LoCo involved, and they ended up participating.

We are looking for others who may be interested in taking up this project in their own communities. By "communities," we are including their schools, their churches, etc. -- while it would be nice to convert your town, we don't want folks to think that this applies only to full towns and cities. You can contact me at lcafiero-at-fixedbylinux-dot-com

Oh, and it's not 100 towns in Italy -- I got that part wrong (my mea culpa is on my blog at http://larrythefreesoftwareguy.wordpress.com), and I misunderstood a European friend who told me it was 100. The Linux Day 2008 site in Italy only has 21 towns and cities -- while it's not triple-digits, it's still impressive.

Thanks again.

Larry Cafiero HeliOS Solutions West 6116 Highway 9, Suite 4B Felton, CA 95018 831-335-7303 http://www.fixedbylinux.com

0 Votes

Any idea which towns/cities in NM are doing this?

thanx rtalcott

0 Votes

Any idea which towns/cities in NM are doing this?

thanx rtalcott

0 Votes
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