Proposed speech to the South Australian Legislative Council by Family First.

[Sam Stainsby]

Pete Brown wrote:
> at the moment i don't have any concerns who delivers it.
> can we keep please keep the political flame wars off the list.

I agree, even though I might be considered by some here to be an 
agnostic, left-wing nut job (in fact, I'm likely to be ratified as the 
ICT spokesperson for the QLD Greens party this weekend, by pure 
coincidence). Policy should be judged on its merits. As far as I'm 
concerned, its OK to endorse a single policy without endorsing the the 
party or person delivering it, or their other policies. We should be 
more interested in making sure good open source and Ubuntu policies get 
the air time that they deserve.

Believe it or not, the media wont beat a path to your door on the issues 
that you want them to, but rather on the issues that will get the media 
companies more attention (and hence more money). This is one of the 
difficult parts of politics. Open source is not so high on the media's 
priority list, though it is getting higher of late. If Family First are 
able to help deliver the open source message, then that is a good thing 
for all in my opinion, and they should be encouraged.

For interests sake, I can report that the QLD Greens use Debian 
GNU/Linux servers, and only because Ubuntu wasn't around back when we 
set things up. Most Greens site are running or building new sites using 
Zope & Plone. We have one Ubuntu deployment in the office, but the 
office manager wont give up Microsoft yet because volunteers come and go 
and need to be immediately familiar with the desktop system (according 
to the office manager). But I'm working on it ... I'm running Ubuntu 
here on two notebooks (Dell & Acer) and an AMD64 box,. My company's 
dedicated server runs Debian. I mostly do ZOpe & Plone application 
development work these days.

Sorry for lurking so long without introducing myself ...

Cheers,
Sam.
http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/

-- 
Sam Stainsby
E-mail: .... sam at stainsby.id.au
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