jonathan carter

On April the 19th, just over a month from now, the Digital Freedom Expo will take place at the University of the Western Cape and will run for two days. It will host high-profile speakers including:

• Prof Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and author of Free Culture
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Bdale Garbee, HP’s Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist
• Brian Behlendorf, Co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and CTO of Collab.net
• Bob Joliffe, founder of Freedom to Innovate SA
• Heather Ford, CEO of iCommons
• and more…

One of the keynote speakers include smooth talkin’ Stafford Masie. Initially I thought, “hopefully seeing him talk Novell out of the latest Novell scandals will be at least mildly entertaining”, but then I decided no, I’m not going to sit back en let him smooth talk himself out of this one! I’ll also ask him some questions that other people might be afraid to ask. Impilinux is attempting to get a slot as well, and we’ll be representing the local Ubuntu community.

I urge all Cluggers (and clug-park readers specifically (also JOCUAMAOE)) and the Ubuntu Loco team to attend and give Masie a run for his money. The last event I attended where he spoke, he just did his usual smooth-talking and people just stared at him, everyone thought he was talking nonsense, but didn’t think it was worth while even talking to him about it. I heard one media person say that his talk was well-received, afterwards. We shouldn’t give him a chance to get away with it again! What might also add some fuel to the fire, is that this is taking place at the University who vowed to phase out Novell completely shortly after the Microsoft/Novell agreement.

Impilinux is considering organising anti-patent t-shirts for the event, if you have any t-shirt ideas, or if you’d like to have one of those t-shirts (you’ll have to attend), then please leave a comment on this blog entry. We’d like to make sure there’s sufficient demand for the t-shirts before printing them

I hope to see you there, it’s going to be a blast!