[TriLUG] book for kids on open source philosophy?

[Robert Dale]

Open Source is like Legos*. Little, reusable pieces that can be
recombined or modified in any way of your choosing and shared with
others.  Now imagine that someone sold you Legos but when you open the
box you discover that all the Lego bricks have been super-glued
together, all the little nubs have been filed-off,  the colors are not
what you like, the arrangement of the blocks are not what you would
have chosen, and there's nothing you can do about it because if you
try to modify them in anyway whatsoever or attempt to share them with
anyone else, the police will come and take you away from your parents
for a very long time; that's closed source.


* disregard, for a moment, the highly patented, trademarked, litigious
brand name and focus on the brick itself ;-)


On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Kevin Hunter wrote:
>
>> From there, he asked where he could read more about it,
>
> .
> .
>>
>> Unfortunately, most literature that I've run across, is directed toward
>> adults.
>
>
> I agree that this is the situation you're in.
>
> One solution is to teach him (this is what adults are for after all). Have a
> back and using his questions to determine the level at which to pitch your
> answers.
>
> You could talk about RMS and the printer, and about IBM in the '60's, when
> scientists found that they had to write platform independant code or else
> spend much of the next hardware cycle (say 3yrs) rewriting their 100,000
> line Fortran simulation for each new machine. Then talk about how the people
> who didn't learn from this fell into the waiting arms of M$.
>
> (I like Igor's and Carl's ideas too)
>
> Having a resource available to answer questions can turn an impossible task
> which won't be tackled into a project which you can expect to succeed.
>
> Joe
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
> --
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-- 
Robert Dale