Success at Mappano

As we wrote a few months ago in this blog, Ercole Carpanetto planned to hold Mappano Open Days in his town in Italy.

Mappano Open Days took place this weekend.

In correspondence with Ercole, he says that the event was a success, where they gave away 200 Live CDs and DVDs of GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software programs to some businessmen and a lot of students and home users.

Like Lindependence in Felton, people came from far and wide: Three women came from Milano, which is more than 150 kilometers away, and a teacher came from Bologna, which is about 200 kilometers away. That beats us: The farthest distance people came to Felton was from Oakland and Berkeley, about 80 miles tops.

I think pictures will be up soon enough either on Ercole’s blog or on the Mappano Open Days site.

Good one, Ercole! Grazie!

Thanks, Mike

Mike Cassidy, the Silicon Valley Dispatches columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, did me, the Linux community and everyone who uses Free/Open Source Software a great favor today by writing his column about Lindependence and what we’ve done, so far, in Felton.

The column is here. Go ahead and take a look. I’ll wait.

[And if for some reason that link doesn't work, just go to SiliconValley.com and click on the link with my picture next to it.]

I want to thank Mike for a.) having an artesian depth of patience with both Bob Lewis and me while we shoveled metric tons of history and general GNU/Linux information his way in the few hours that Mike stayed here (no, we didn’t keep him hostage), and b.) writing a column that I think captured the essence of Lindependence in Felton.

Karen Borchers also took great photos of me in the so-called “underground bunker.” My only regret is that she didn’t have her “slim-down-by-50-pounds” lens with her to make me look more like, oh I don’t know, Michael Phelps.

So, thanks Mike and Karen.

North to Portland

After a few weeks of scoping some sites and getting some other organizational matters straightened out, David Kaplan has gotten Portland, Ore., on the Lindependence map. As you can see from the title of the blog above, we have dropped the “Felton” because that town — my town — is now part of Lindependence history and we’re going forward and northward.

As of their 2007 census, the city of Portland has 568,380 people. So before we start, let’s be clear about something (especially to the ever-shrinking group of naysayers out there): Lindependence won’t convert the entire city of Portland. Let me repeat that: Lindependence won’t convert the entire city of Portland.

We were not under the impression that we would convert the entire town of Felton, California, back in July. It would have been nice to have the whole town using Linux, but let’s exist in the real world, shall we? What Lindependence did achieve in Felton was, in purely agricultural terms, sowing the seeds of FOSS into the soil of a generally fertile and receptive community, and nurturing the crop begins Saturday with the first Felton LUG meeting.

Farmer David is sowing those same seeds in Portland, with a little help — okay, a significant amount of help — from Touchstone Technology, which has graciously agreed to host the event. David has also put up a Web site for the event, which will be the place to go for specific details about Lindependence Portland.

I’ll still be blogging about Portland and other Lindependence events here, and Lindependence ‘08 will still be the site to go to for information about how to do this project.