065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Google's Highly Open Participation Program tries to get young students into Open Source and Joomla! specifically. Everyone is welcome, there are not limits. You can be a coder, documenter, tester, translator to help out. Jump in and start helping!
Locked
hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Sat Dec 15, 2007 1:21 am

i have withdrawn form task#088 because of computer problems, and i
have claimed this task.

Create a fun tri-fold brochure that introduces the reader to Richard
Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and Rasmus Lerdorf and their
contributions to Free Software.

Possible information resources:

    * Personal sites of these individuals
    * Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/
    * Google Search - http://google.com/
Google Task

Claimed; 12/14/2007 Due: 12/28/2007
[me=AmyStephen]Updated project information.[/me]
Last edited by AmyStephen on Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Sat Dec 15, 2007 3:37 am

This will be a fun one! Thanks for choosing another Joomla! task.

Look forward to viewing your progress.

Amy :)

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Tue Dec 18, 2007 5:24 am

hpatel -

I encourage you to share an outline of your plans and start engaging some community involvement as soon as you can!

Thanks!
Amy :)

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Fri Dec 21, 2007 12:34 am

my layout so far:

front cover: Title and Jooma! logo
inside flap: Who are the pioneers?
3 inside panels: bios of each person
back panel: Joomla logo,and links for more info

sorry for the long wait, but my teachers are trying to load us with last minute homework. :'(
My break starts tomorrow, so i will try to submit my first draft then.

thanks,
hpatel

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Wed Dec 26, 2007 8:42 pm


AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Thu Dec 27, 2007 4:36 am

Great start! Now, it will be good to make it more visible how these people impacted free software and paved a way for Joomla!. Why do they matter to our community? These are some ideas and points I would like to see this tri-fold cover. I don't really think it matters as much when these people were born and where they work, etc., just hit the main points of what they contributed and why it matters to Joomla!.

1. Front page - Pioneers of Free Software

I think something else should be here - symbols for the GPL, Linux, Open Source Institute, PHP and Joomla! would be nice.

2. What is Free Software?

Focus on the liberties - four freedoms of software - The Free Software Definition
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

3. Richard Stallman

Free Software Foundation - http://www.fsf.org/

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute modified computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software,

GNU General Public License, version 2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-license ... .html  - the license that Joomla! uses

Copyleft and the GNU GPL - http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html - What is copyleft?

4. Linus Torvalds

Created Linux kernel for the GNU/Linux system

On September 17, 1991, he posted a message in a Minix users newsgroup, announcing that a rough cut of his creation could be downloaded for free from a university Internet site. Use Linux if you'd like, he instructed people, but any changes, new features, or improvements you devise must be shared with everyone else at no cost. It's an idea he borrowed from Richard Stallman, who had devised the General Public License, an agreement by which entrepreneurs could charge as much as they liked for a program but had to provide access to its source code.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Since then, an enormous industry was born with many distributions of Linux, and big players like Microsoft and IBM found their industry was being redefined by communities developing and supporting free software.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... c/Gldt.svg

5. Eric Raymond

Raymond wrote about community approaches to developing free/open source software.

Author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar  http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Eric Raymond says that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.”

Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Torvalds but coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief.

He also understood the importance of appealing to the business sector and, for that reason, helped form the Open Source Initiative (OSI)  - http://www.opensource.org/

Who is OSI? The OSI are the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant.

OSD - http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

Maintain Open Source Licenses - http://www.opensource.org/licenses

6. Rasmus Lerdorf

creator of the PHP programming language in which Joomla! is written.
Since September 2002, he has been employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer.
His current focus is on increasing awareness of good security practices with PHP and speaks to these issues at conferences and in interviews. At the 2006 OSCMS Conference, Rasmus highlighted areas for improvements that each open source CMS should build into their projects. (Share picture of J! devs talking with Rasmus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf )

7. Back page

Keep it simple, I think - the logo and For more information, visit Joomla!'s website: joomla.org should be enough.

Anyway, some ideas....Amy :)

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Thu Dec 27, 2007 11:48 pm

i think i incorporated all of your advice into my final. please tell me if there is anything else that i need to change.
here it is! :D
http://rapidshare.com/files/79508603/final1.odt.html
thanks for all your help,
hpatel

User avatar
trombonechamp
Joomla! Explorer
Joomla! Explorer
Posts: 403
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 9:37 pm
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by trombonechamp » Fri Dec 28, 2007 12:31 am

-What about Tim O'Reilly?  He was far more influential than Rasmus Lerdorf. 
Raymond has written many books incuding The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
-This isn't a book.  It is an essay.  There is a book out called The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Selected Essays of Eric S. Raymond, but the famous "Cathedral and the Bazaar" is just an essay.
Linus Torvalds is mostly known for creating the Linux kernel, which is used woth the GNU operating system that Richard Stallman developed.
-Since you say this, Richard Stallman should go before Torvalds.  Regarding this, it might be best to put these people in chronological order based on their achievements. 
-That is an old picture of Stallman.  You can find some on Google, but there are some less often used ones at http://www.stallman.org/photos/index.html (that also means you will have to dig for a good one).
-There are a bunch of spelling issues, but spellcheck should fix those.  There are also a few places where you don't put spaces after the periods.
Leonard Bernstein for President -
Web Development Services: www.BernsteinForPresident.com
My Software Freedom Blog: Trombonechamp.Wordpress.com

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Fri Dec 28, 2007 3:19 am

Good points, Max. Agree with your comments. The chronological order is what I was getting at with my earlier posts.

Also, on Raymond, there is no reason to mention his health issues. I would prefer to see the limited space go to OSD and the OSI's licensing and his work helping connect open source software with the business community.

I guess, Max, about why these four, and why not O'Reilly, for example, I think it's clear how Rasmus relates to Joomla!, given he created PHP. This assignment is to help introduce those new to open source to several key players so that they can study more, if they want to.

So far, a very good start! Wish this type of material had been available for me when I started using Joomla!.

I want to ask Rafa to help review this, too, since he is very well educated in free/open source software. Hopefully, in the next day or so, he'll have the opportunity to do so.

Amy :)

User avatar
trombonechamp
Joomla! Explorer
Joomla! Explorer
Posts: 403
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 9:37 pm
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by trombonechamp » Fri Dec 28, 2007 12:43 pm

Raymond was the reason netscape ended up going open source (Someone from the company heard "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", it was a speech before it was an essay).  This was the first major company to take open source seriously.  It paved the way for others to follow in its footsteps.  Hey, without it, we wouldn't have firefox!!!  It would be a good idea to add this, especially because this is how many people were first introduced to open source as a business strategy.

The thing I feel is absent from Richard Stallman's section is how much of a genius programmer he was.  When he worked at MIT AI labs in college, he single handedly matched the effort of a large group of programmers as he rewrote every feature of a commercial operating system as it came out.  He wrote the GCC compiler.  This compiler was far more powerful than any of the proprietary options, but he made his himself.  The proprietary compilers were made by teams of developers.  This guy corrected the Harvard professor in the hardest math class offered at Harvard.  He has "GENIUS" written all over him!

In Linus' section, I would like to see more about his skills in social engineering.  He even said himself, "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do."  Before Torvalds, no one had been able to smoothly coordinate thousands of developers to get them to work together and improve a piece of software.  Linus shattered Brooks' law into little tiny shards.

I know nothing about Rasmus Lerdorf.  What you have looks great.
Leonard Bernstein for President -
Web Development Services: www.BernsteinForPresident.com
My Software Freedom Blog: Trombonechamp.Wordpress.com

ibnhafsun
Joomla! Hero
Joomla! Hero
Posts: 2318
Joined: Fri Aug 19, 2005 9:41 pm
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by ibnhafsun » Fri Dec 28, 2007 11:53 pm

Hi, hpatel. I did a quick read of your document yesterday. I'd like to review it tomorrow.

It uses to be hard to explain us (the simple users like me) what makes these guys special and always it's better to take a funny approach. There was a game where you had to find if the guy in a picture was a serial killer or a programmer. With you examples it's easy: all of them have two profiles. Think about Stallman's St. IGNUcius (his alter ego).

Sometimes, IMVHO, a brochure should have just the information an average visitor (I mean a not very interested in your stand or conference one) is not expecting and the keys to found the information you are willing to share. You will remember always a guy wearing a disk platter halo blessing a computer even if you were my grandmother. And you will remember him better if you present his "other side" with simple points.

A nice resource too:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensour ... k/toc.html


PS: I was late too
Last edited by ibnhafsun on Sat Dec 29, 2007 12:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
...nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses...
http://www.todosjuntos.org
http://inmo-e.com

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Sat Dec 29, 2007 12:08 am

here is the final with all changes made.
hope you like it! :D
http://rapidshare.com/files/79743029/final.zip.html
thanks for all your help

guyjosephuk
I've been banned!
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:02 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by guyjosephuk » Sat Dec 29, 2007 12:11 am

If you want an easy to digest view of the "heroes/pioneers" of free and open source software spend 85 minutes watching Revolution OS, an excellent documentary with some great quotes you could use. 

REVOLUTION OS features interviews with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, Frank Hecker, and Rob Malda.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 2627775409


(posted this as you posted your final version - sorry if this link was too late)

User avatar
trombonechamp
Joomla! Explorer
Joomla! Explorer
Posts: 403
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 9:37 pm
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by trombonechamp » Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:46 am

To qualify as free software, programs
must meet the 4 freedoms of
software, created by Richard
Stallman, one of the pioneers.
This is a run-on.
Here they are in simplified form:
People don't want to waste their time reading about something that is "almost" one of the four freedoms.  Drop the "simplified" part.
The freedom to release
modifications for the benefit of
the community
It doesn't have to be to benefit the community.  Public domain software, if the source code is available, is free software.  There can be commercial offshoots of pd code.

Is there a higher resolution picture of rms you can use?
Since then, the Linux industry has
grown to become a formidable enemy
to  commercial    vendors such  as
Microsoft and IBM.
IBM? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 1924223277

He has
written an essay called The Cathedral
and    the  Bazaar.  After  hearing
Raymond's      speech,      Netscape...
You didn't mention that "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was a speech first!  People will be confused!
we have Firefox today!.
A "." and a "!"?  Getting to used to typing, "... Joomla!."


In the section about Richard Stallman, you talked a lot about the organizations he started, but not about him.  I would really like to see more about Richard Stallman instead of just about GNU and FSF.  Consider some of the things I said previously.  Consider St. IGNUcious as well.
Also, please consider saying something about Torvalds' social engineering skills.  This was his genius point.
Leonard Bernstein for President -
Web Development Services: www.BernsteinForPresident.com
My Software Freedom Blog: Trombonechamp.Wordpress.com

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Mon Dec 31, 2007 1:47 pm

am i still allowed to change the tri fold, or is it past the due date?

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Tue Jan 01, 2008 4:04 am

Keep going - you are doing fine! You have been working with the community and responding in a positive way to people's ideas. What more could we ask for? Plus, I think you are nearly complete.

Please continue, just as you have been doing. All of you!

Amy :)

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:04 pm


User avatar
trombonechamp
Joomla! Explorer
Joomla! Explorer
Posts: 403
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 9:37 pm
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by trombonechamp » Thu Jan 03, 2008 12:11 am

The GNU operating system, which uses the Linux kernel, has many free alternatives to commercial programs.
The GNU os is an alternative to proprietary operating systems (you should probably call it proprietary instead of commercial).  Yes, many FOSS programs run on it, but it is an operating system that offers an alternitive to M$ and Apple.
who worked with MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab.
He worked at (not with) MIT, and capitalize "Lab".
Since then, the Linux industry has grown to become a formidable enemy to commercial vendors such as Microsoft.
The GNU/Linux operating system is an enemy, not just the Linux kernel!
Leonard Bernstein for President -
Web Development Services: www.BernsteinForPresident.com
My Software Freedom Blog: Trombonechamp.Wordpress.com

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Thu Jan 03, 2008 12:17 am

Love it.  :-*

Get Max's changes in and let's call it a wrap. You might be surprised to learn how many will get their first bit off free/open source learning from this brochure. Thanks to all of you for helping improve it!

As Max says ...
Change:
The GNU operating system, which uses the Linux kernel, has many free alternatives to commercial programs.
To:
The GNU operating system is an excellent alternative to proprietary operating systems.
Change:
who worked with MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab.
To:
who worked at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Change:
Since then, the Linux industry has grown to become a formidable enemy to commercial vendors such as Microsoft.
To:
Since then, the GNU/Linux community has become a formidable competitor to proprietary vendors, such as Microsoft.
hpatel - You work and play well with others. Thanks!
Amy :)

hpatel
Joomla! Apprentice
Joomla! Apprentice
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:26 pm

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by hpatel » Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:36 pm

thanks for all the help i look forward to working with joomla again!
http://rapidshare.com/files/80986519/final6.zip.html

AmyStephen
Joomla! Champion
Joomla! Champion
Posts: 7018
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 3:35 pm
Location: Nebraska
Contact:

Re: 065 - Create a tri-fold brochure entitled "Pioneers of Free Software"

Post by AmyStephen » Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:50 pm

hpatel -

Post it on Google and I will mark this complete.

Thank you for yet another wonderful contribution to the Joomla! community!

Amy :)


Locked

Return to “Google's Highly Open Participation Contest”