Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 21:12:44 -0500 From: Mit Rowe <mit@mitayai.org> To: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Grants Message-ID: <41B3C01C.4060602@mitayai.org>
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Hi, folks! I'm Mit, and i've been your ca.FreeBSD.Org hostmaster for many years. I'm pretty quiet on a international scale, but i've been active as a local advocate for the FreeBSD community in every community i have involvement in since a copy of FreeBSD 2.0 landed on my desk in early '95. I have also considered it my duty to encourage FreeBSD mirrors in Canada, but I have been constantly frustrated by my ability to have corporations provide long-term resources to the FreeBSD Project in terms of WWW, FTP, and CVSUp mirrors of the FreeBSD releases, source, and documentation. This frustration has led me to think of turning to the government of Canada, starting from the Communications Research Centre (an agency of Industry Canada) and working my way up, looking for either them to host the FreeBSD mirror or provide a grant to someone to do so. However, before i speak for the FreeBSD Project, i believe that i am honour-bound to request feed back on my intent and method; therefore, i ask your feedback, comments and advice on the following letter i think i should send first to info@crc.ca and see what kind of feedback i receive from them (which i would report back). Also, perhaps any lurking Canadians out there could hold up their hands? I sometimes feel pretty lonely out here in this corner of the world :-) Regards, Mit Here's the text of the letter in English (i'm also going to write it in French, our other language of government in Canada, in case any of the potential readers are francophone). Please comment as soon as possible. ===== My name is William Rowe, commonly known as Mit Rowe, and i am a Canadian member of the FreeBSD community and serve in the capacity of Hostmaster for the FreeBSD Subdomain. FreeBSD is, as the website http://www.freebsd.org/ describes, "...an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals <http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/index.html>. Additional platforms <http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/index.html> are in various stages of development." It is a freely available, opensource operating system with no restrictions on commercial use. More information of the licenses can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html. The core documentation of FreeBSD is available in both national languages, as are large chunks of ancillary documentation. I have worked in the ISP and IT industries for over a decade, and am well aware of the prevalent use of FreeBSD in Canada, in both the private and public sectors in corporations large and small, Internet Service Providers and non-profit, charitable, governmental and educational institutions. The level of interest and use warrants the existence of resources to install, configure, maintain, upgrade and support the operating system, which can be done through the allocation of resources for mirroring the FreeBSD source and documentation in order to make more efficient use of global Internet resources. The use of public funds to support a free platform which runs much of the infrastructure of our nation is both a way of supporting the existing infrastructure and making it easier for Canadians to support and further develop this technology, and will also serve to help increase and support our international reputation as a center for Technology and Communications, and the pride that we IT professionals feel in for the country which we are honoured to be able to call our home. With respect, Will Mitayai Keeso Rowe Toronto, ON mitayai@ca.freebsd.org
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