[Fsfe-ie] Invitation text...

[Éibhear]

Hi,

I was speaking to a friend of mine today who works for the venture capital
company HotOrigin. He is keen to attend RMS' talk, but due to commitments he
will be out of the country. I ask if he knew Brian Caulfield and if he would
suggest to him to go. He said, yes and no. Mr. Caulfield would be open to
going, but it would be best to extend the invitation to him officially.

On another, but related point, my friend read the letter to Mary Hanafin
from Open Ireland. He felt that the approach was wrong. I think he wasn't
keen on the notion that OpenIreland might want to "influence the Irish
Government to develop informed policy re OSS as has been done in many other
countries in Europe and around the world, instead of suggesting that they
*participate* in developing the policy, and instead of suggesting that the
curent policy is uninformed (even if it is -- never forget Martin Cullen!).

With that in mind, is there a text floating around that will form the basis
of invitations to the talk? If not, here's my suggestion. It makes the
following assumptions:

1. The recipient will not necessarily be
familiar with the concept of free software,
or even that there's a movement for same.
2. The recipient will not know of nor care
about the distinction between free software
and open source software, though the
likelihood is that the recipient *will* be
familiar with the term "open source
software".
3. The recipient will not respond well to
being told his/her view point is wrong.
Nor will he/she respond kindly to an
attempt to re-educate him/her on the topic
of free software and patents while
inviting him/her to a talk that will
hope to do just that.
4. The recipient will have concerns other
than ours, and will appreciate an
invitation from an organisation interested
in engaging debate rather than performing
some Neducation(TM).

So, without further ado (apologies in advance for the quasi-regexp
notation):

===========================
(A chara|Dear (Sir|Madam)),

On Monday the 24th of May, Richard Stallman will be giving a public lecture
on "The Dangers of Software Patents". This talk is being organised by the
Irish Free Software Organisation (http://ifso.ie/) in association with the
Dublin University Internet Society. It will start at 19:30 in the MacNeill
Theatre in Trinity College. He will be explaining how software patents
inhibit software development and innovation. We would be delighted if you
could attend the talk to learn about the concerns of the free and open
source software communities.

Mr. Stallman, author of many popular software programs like the GNU Compiler
Collection, GNU Emacs and the GNU Project Debugger, founded the Free
Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) in 1984. He is also the author of
the GNU General Public License (GPL) which is used by most Free and Open
Source Software projects, like the Linux kernel and the OpenOffice suite of
office applications, to distribute their programs.

If you would like to attend, please contact us at info at ifso.ie or by ringing
<phone_number_here>.

Yours sincerely,

<Representative name>
Irish Free Software Organisation.
===========================

I really don't know the correct way to sign these things off, but hopefully
some one will take the ball and run with it.

Sin é,

Éibhear

--
Éibhear Ó hAnluain
IFSO
Ireland.