Club Linux Coffs Harbour

I made up some simple posters of inspirational quotes to hang around the room on Software Freedom Day. Feel free to suggest your own; here's what I've come up with so far:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Thomas Jefferson
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html

“The more we give away, the richer we become.”

“In the twenty-first century, there will be no such thing as an unpublished poet, which is good, because in the twentieth century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet.”

“It is not possible for industrial organizations to do a better job of distributing music than 12 year-olds can do.”

Eben Moglen, founder and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu

“Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that. Intellectual property - treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded - is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.”

Andrew Brown, Guardian Newspaper (UK)
Saturday, November 19, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1646125,00.html

Microsoft's problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them. Whatever other charges might be levelled against Microsoft, technical incompetence isn't one. [...] Microsoft's struggles with Vista suggest [that free software] may be the only way to do operating systems in future.”

John Naughon, Guardian Newspaper (UK)
Sunday May 7, 2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1769108,00.html

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer
life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that
I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have
received and am still receiving.”

Albert Einstein
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

Isaac Newton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

“Think about this for a moment: what are your chances of becoming the world’s foremost expert on a proprietary content management system (CMS) or on proprietary software in general? Unless you’re working for the company owning the software and you get access to proprietary documents or high-level meetings within corporate walls, your chances are slim—you simply won’t get access to all the internal information.

"Contrast this scenario with Drupal development. As a developer, you have access to Drupal’s complete source code. You can read up on all the discussion that led to any design decisions, and you can tap right into the brains of the best Drupal developers in the world. In fact, there is nothing that stops you from becoming the best Drupal developer in the world. The only limitation is your willingness to learn.”

Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of the Drupal web content management system.
From the forward of “Pro Drupal Development” http://www.drupalbook.com/

“Free software should be an obvious civil-society issue. It should be as obvious as recycling cans. It should be something that every parent should be asking when they go into a parent-teacher meeting: is the school using free software? Is my child being taught to use free software? Having control over your computer and knowing that your devices aren’t spying on you, that you have an ethical computer – [these] are all issues for civil society.”

Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation
http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2006/11/01/software/

“I don't want to sell my music. I'd like to give it away because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it.”

Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Captain_Beefheart