Now I understand the viewpoint that motivated your
earlier email. In this light, the direct to
adversarial approach would seem to make more sense.
Hmmm - can we ascertain whether this is the case
prior to the meeting? If not, my tendency is to
think that while it is possible to do nice first
then agressive, it is much harder to go the other
way. Once we're on adversarial footing, there's
no going back.
My tendency would be to err on the side of making
friends, but maybe it is worth considering blind-
siding them.
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Trent Shipley wrote:
> The probability is high that Maricopa County IT is *not* taking this
> seriously. That is they view the argument about Monopoly rules as a PR and
> legal hassle to be finessed, and the Linux/Free Software community as an
> annoying collection of libertarian hacker ne'er-do-wells.
>
> Prediction:
>
> Paul Allsing, Deputy CIO, Maricopa County holds a forum. Its point is
> three-fold.
>
> 1) Allay any concern that the County is in violation of its own procurement
> rules.
>
> 2) Contain the Linux PR nuisance.
>
> 3) Take the measure of the Linux activists against future interaction with
> the rabble nuisance.
>
>
> In short, County IT's goal is to accomplish precisely nothing with the forum
> except to have the *nixen rabble leave with a warmer fuzzier feeling--or if
> that is not possible, have us leave well aware that County IT is
> professional, is sure of its strategic policy, and is assured by counsel that
> its procurement policies are entirely legal ... so we can take our
> enthusiastic hacker selves and go suck eggs.
>
>
> What do you want to bet that Paul Allsing is Deputy CIO for Customer Service
> and Public Relations?
>
>
>
> On Wednesday 03 July 2002 08:20, you wrote:
> > If they are taking this seriously then
> > case studies could help.
> ________________________________________________
> See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.
>
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"We need commonsense judges who understand that our rights were
derived from God," - President George W. Bush, 27 June 2002
http://www.nandotimes.com/politics/story/448758p-3591873c.html
What if he had said, "our rights are derived from Vishnu?"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
(text/plain)