Welcome, race fans

Throughout the South — or anywhere that holds a NASCAR race — you’ll see signs that say “Welcome, race fans” pop up with ubiquity. So it would be interesting to see if there’s a crop of “Welcome, Ubunteros” signs cropping up in Oakland for the Ubuntu Developers Summit, which starts today.

Have fun, guys and gals.

I won’t be there. I can hear the collective sigh of relief. Since I’m the Emannuel Goldstein of the Ubuntu/Canonical set, they’re just going to have to broadcast my picture during their three-minutes-of-hate session and leave it at that.

Rather than attend an event designed to line Mark Shuttleworth’s pockets with “coin” (pronounced kwan), I think I’ll do something more constructive. I’m teaching a class — it’s sort of a rolling head start into the next school year — on Python to homeschooled middle schoolers/high schoolers at my daughter’s base school. Using “Snake Wrangling for Kids,” we’ll get started on making some FOSS developers, hopefully, out of some of the students here.

So, benefit one or benefit all?

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides true FOSS solutions — which no longer includes Canonical/Ubuntu products — in the small business and home office environment.)