Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[Mathewson]

My wife is Bulgarian, her father was ina Communist prison
camp . . . 

Oh, Dear, Richmond gets personal again!

Yes, he does . . . 

I would like to take issue with Senor Garzia:

(and, I suppose this all comes down to politics)

I am not a socialist, and not a communist, and not a
supporter of pie-in-the-sky ideas propped up by some sage's
half-baked ideology that fails to take human nature into
account.

Earliert his year I went to Sofia (Capital of Bulgaria) and
listened to Richard Stallman, and reached the follwoing
conclusions:

1. He is a long-haired hippy rather like the ones in Brazil
(mind you, I bet he can't speech portugese).

2. I agreed with almost everything he said - BUT not for
the silly, loony-lefty reasons he gave.

3. I want a world where there is NO social handout system;
BUT where everybody has a reasonably level playing-field to
start off from: so they can't come whining, subsequently,
about being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, as
an excuse for their laziness or turpitude.

I am also not a utopian who wishes to sweep away Microsoft
and Macintosh for a 'new millenium' of open source software
full of holes. To prove a point, I'm writing this to you in
Firefox (an open source browser) running on Windows XP (not
open source unless I'm very stupid and missed something). I
do 90% of my programming on a number of Macintosh computers
with Mac OS X that cost me a whole lot of money which I
earned with my own, fair, used-to-be lily-white hands.

However, I do think that there is a place for open source
initiatives; especially in places such as (and if any one
wants to point out that I am not politically correct; don't
waste your time - I am a fairly right-wing reactionary - so
there) Africa (or, to put it really crudely; the places
where the colonial powers made the mistake of leaving
without bothering to educate the local people so they could
get ahead rather than become prey to horrible dicators;
c.f. Mugabe, Idi Amin, and so on), India and the rest of
the sub-continent, where a very large section of the
population doesn't stand a chance to get on the escalator
which will give them a chance in a proper meritocracy.

What is a big sadness to me is that open-source software is
associated with lefties, 'pinkos', 'long-haired loonies' or
whatever, when the need to use open-source should be seen
not as a political stance at all, but as a way to increase
everybody's level of knowledge, wealth and so on.

Now, one day a week, from February, I will be offering
Bulgarian school teachers, free programming classes using
the Novell RR 2.2.1 on Ubuntu - all their school computers
(such as they are - few) run on Microsoft Windows 98 - it
is their problem as to how they transfer that empowering
knowledge; either by badgering the BG government to buy
licences for RR, or by badgering the govt/local ed.
authority to go open source.  Why am I offering these free
classes ? - because it will work as an advertisement for
both my language school and for my freelance computer
installation and programming work.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson
__________________________________________________
See Mathewson's software at:

http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html
_______________________________________
---------------------------------------------------------------
The Think Different Store
http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/
For All Your Mac Gear
---------------------------------------------------------------