[Koha-devel] tropheesdulibre => more complete news.

[paul POULAIN]

Hi,
As some persons asked for more informations aroudn tropheesdulibre, here 
are some.
1st of all, i put a scanned trophy. As you can see, it's awful. It's due 
to the fact that it's done in plexiglass, on 3 differents parts, for 
10cm depth. quite hard to scan, I couldn't do better, sorry.

1st of all, I arrived 1 day before the ceremony. It was quite a good 
idea : I met some really nice hackers from other projects, and some ppl 
involved in free software.
We went to bed at 11:30PM, and 3 of us stayed till 1AM to install the 
new-top-wonderful-wifi-card-with-pcmcia_ps-patched-kernel. I went to bed :-)
Then, it was time for the "tropheesdulibre" day...
Around 250 persons were here. Many hackers, with debian of deCss 
t-shirts, and many businessmen too.

9:00 -> 9:30 : RMS evangelist was here to say once more that freedom was 
more important than anything else (I must admit that even if I have 
respect for RMS, I think that his speech was not productive for business 
men/women).
9:30->10:30 : roberto DiCosmo had a very interesting speech (i think 
everybody know this guy ? In france, he's well known anyway). something 
around "why will free software win".
11:00-> 12:30 : time with journalists. With a very very interesting 
speech from M. Lang, french scientist from CNRS, about free software 
economy. To resume, he said "when you share something like your bred, 
you loose some. but when you share your software, you earn more than you 
loose".
12:30-> 14:00 : time for lunch. With lot of alcool I didn't drink 
(alcool makes me ill) :-)
14:00-> 16:00 : time for trophy. I don't think it was a nice ceremony. 
Some interesting speechs, but the interviewer asked always the same 
questions.
16:00-> 18:00 : eating again :-)
18:00-> ... trying to go back home. But my 1st train was late, so I 
failed to have my 2nd one and had to stay in Paris for the night.

My experience :
I met some really interesting ppl :
* The hacker that works on abuledu : a specific linux distro based on 
mandrake, that is builded for french schools. He plans to add Koha on 
AbulEdu in the near future.
* Some journalists that will write a paper about Koha. They work on very 
specific news that are only for public agencies. So it's really more 
interesting than being in linuxworld or something like that.
* A company that is involved only in free software, and has some 
contacts with public agencies libraries.

As a conclusion : it was a very interesting meeting for business 
purposes for me. And we won !!!
I have to say many thanks to steve that subscribed for all of us :-)

An important news, about something else :
In France, there is a very famous and important customer association 
(UFC-Que choisir).
They announced yesterday that they attacked in justice (approximative 
translation...) 5 "majors" (EMI Music France, Warner Music France, 
Universal Pictures Vidéo, Auchan, FNAC) because of their copy-protection 
on recent CD that makes them unuseable on some recent equipements. It's 
the 1st stage of a more global lobbying action against the EUCD 
(european version of dmca)
UFC is a very important association here in France : every radio or TV 
news speaks of this action. they have a very good press-relation 
manager. The court decision will occur at end of june. UFC is known to 
attack only when sure to win.

--
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)