[Fsfe-ie] Summary of last meeting, October 16th (corrected)

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

all names now correct, and one additional point added to the end,
thanks to Aidan Delaney.
--------
Last thursdays (16th) meeting was one of the best yet.  Buckets of
stuff got discussed, but few notes were taken.  I've been in over my
head with work, so this is late, please add anything I've forgotten.

Attendees:
 Aidan Delaney
 Lorrainne Dully
 Ciaran O'Riordan
 Glenn Strong
 Mel McWeeney
 Malcolm Tyrrell
 Some drunk off the street* (5 mins)

There was much talk of what the immenent Irish Free Software
Organisation should do and how it should do it.

Glenn offered to look into registering ifso.ie, and getting some details
about what legal entity we could form.

I talked about a "Business Freedom" project that I'd like to work on to
visit companies, explaining what Free Software is and how it would
benefit them.

The drunk off the street attempted to act as a moderater but his alcohol
level rendered him inneffective and got him kicked out.

There was much talk about Beaumont hospital switching to Free Software,
for low cost initially but now appearantly realising the long term
benefits of Free Software. (Tony Kenny was the man in charge.)

We all discussed the evoting issue.  I think consensus was formed that
we should assist a seperate group rather than make it an IFSO project.
There was unanimous agreement that we should demand permission to view,
compile, and test full source code.  There was disagreement over the
need/practicallity of demanding permission to distribute altered
versions, but in case of disagreement we would default to demanding
fully Free Software, and see how far we can get.

It was noted that manpower will limit us to working on whatever people
will offer to work on, and cash will limit people to work on whatever
they can do without financial aid.  Initial cash from membership etc.
would probably only cover the ifso.ie domain and maybe a run of
leaflets.

Funding was discussed for a minute or two, I suggested initial funding
by having a 20quid membership/supporter fee.  I don't think there were
any disagreements, but no real discussion happened.

It was noted that aside from regular projects, "fire fighting" will need
to be done whenever important issues like bad EU directives pop up.

I raised the question of whether democracy was a good idea or not, but
the discussion was put away for another time.

Aidan talked about his work on a CD of Debian-stable+GNOME2.4 targetted
at primary schools, and the ifso.cs.may.ie domain he has set up.  I
offered to provide some content (not done yet).

It was suggested that we should make a regular date for meetings,
consensus formed on having them on the second Thursday of each month.
Unless challenged on the list, this should happen. (next: Nov 13th)

GNOME Vs. KDE, obscure useful shell tools (Mel) and a boot load of other
topics.

I'm certain to have forgotten stuff, so reply to the mail if you
remember other topics.

+ for IFSO, it was decided that we need a written objective

-- 
Ciaran O'Riordan - http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/