[Ambassadors] Lindependence and RMLL reports?

[Larry Cafiero]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Max Spevack <mspevack at redhat.com> wrote:
> Over the weekend, two interesting events happened -- one was Lindependence
> and the other was RMLL.
>

Hi, Max --

Sorry for being so tardy, but two of the three Lindependence events
took place on July 13 and July 15 at the Felton Presbyterian Church in
Felton, California. For a very short recap of the project,
Lindependence is introducing GNU/Linux to the town of Felton during
the month of July, and part of the project is to have volunteers go
Microsoft-free for a week with the hope they will go proprietary free
forever :-) Four major distros -- Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu and Debian
-- had representatives at the meetings, as well as OpenOffice.org

You can find the site at http://www.lindependence.net or my running
diary at http://lin08.wordpress.com

The third event is scheduled for July 26, as part of a day-long
activities in the town celebrating the purchase of their waterworks
from a multinational corporation (a long story here).

In any case, about 150 people came on Sunday (July 13) and perhaps the
most interesting facet of the project was that people were asking to
have their laptops and desktops converted from Windows -- they had had
enough of Microsoft and they were looking for something new. Around 10
people left with GNU/Linux on their computers -- mostly Ubuntu,
unfortunately for us (more on this later) -- which personally I found
astounding. Frankly, I thought people would be apprehensive, but there
was such a groundswell against the Redmond product that it was
awe-inspiring.

While I was doing most of the oversight of the project as its
organizer, I also represented Fedora and answered questions, showed
Fedora 9 on both a iBook G3 and a Dell 5000 Inspiron laptop, and I
handed out some live CDs -- the live CDs were from the Cabrillo
College GNU/Linux Users Group -- with my card in case they needed
support. Were I not responsible for the entire event, I would have had
more time to represent Fedora solely, and Frank Turner of Cabrillo
GLUG helped at the table. While we handed out a significant number of
live CDs -- 20-30 by my estimation -- I don't think any of the
computers that left the building on Sunday had Fedora on them.

On Tuesday, about 50 people showed up to check out GNU/Linux, and with
it being more low-key, I was able to talk about Fedora more with folks
who attended, giving away a significant number of live CDs. The tone
was pretty much the same: We've had enough of Windows -- we want a
change.

Again, one of the things about this project that is very surprising is
that people are really fed up with Windows, to the point where they
don't even want to consider dual-booting or just trying Linux from a
live CD -- many people wanted to "get this s**t off my machine" (and
you know, of course, what they're talking about) and install Linux
straight away and have it solely as their operating system.

So on the whole this event so far has been a success, and I am hoping
that Fedora benefits from its participation.

For the 26th, I'm going to call out Karsten Wade publicly: Karsten, I
really need help on the 26th, and I'm inviting any other ambassador
who is nearby to come to Felton (just over the hill from Silicon
Valley) to represent Fedora. We're out of live CDs and have no other
materials to offer, and as the organizer of this event, I will not be
able to give the Fedora table the attention it deserves.

If you're still awake at this point, thank you for reading all the way through.

Larry Cafiero
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lcafiero