[FSFLA-Traductores] boletín 1 de junio: editorial

[Beatriz Busaniche]

Va otra parte del boletín para traducir.
Esta está en inglés...
falta la versión en español, portugués y francés.

luego mando el resto! 

abrazos y muchas gracias

Recuerden, quien tome la tarea, avise a la lista! 

......................................................

The "L" in LUG stands for "Free Software"

When what was going to become a very active Free Software user group in
Colombia were looking for a name, what came naturally to them was
"COLIBRI --- Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia". You
will notice that the acronym doesn't match the name, probably owing to
the fact that the word "colibrí" (hummingbird) was just too beautiful to
be sacrificed to the need of actually meaning anything.

At the moment of their founding, not all user groups were as insightful,
or maybe as lucky, as COLIBRI was. In most cases, they were built by
groups of people who had discovered something truly wonderful: software
they could study and tweak to their heart's desire, programs they could
share freely with their friends, and which they could use without having
to submit to restrictive conditions unilaterally set by its author. Very
often, they had gotten to know this software through a Unix-workalike
operating system many people referred to as "Linux", so when they set
out to tell the world about it, most of them formed a "Linux User
Group", or LUG.

Only after their members had become better acquainted with Free
Software's philosophy and history did many of the LUGs become aware of
the GNU project's importance. Some of them felt strongly enough about
their original mistake as to change their names. Sometimes they changed
the meaning of the acronym (Mendoza's LUGMen became "LUGMen Usa
GNU/Linux en Mendoza", mirroring GNU's recursion), sometimes they
changed the name to something that didn't fit the acronym at all
(Rosario's LUGRo became "Grupo de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de Rosario").
Others felt that both solutions were awkward enough, or that the issue
were not worth the trouble.

Recently, however, more and more LUGs are realizing that keeping the
emphasis on "Linux" is not the right thing to do, that even broadening
their focus to GNU/Linux is still not good enough, and that nothing
short of "Free Software" will do. This follows from three observations
that are becoming unavoidable:
      * the topic of the LUGs is much broader than Linux, even than
        GNU/Linux. Asking for help with a BSD system on a LUG's mailing
        list is not considered offtopic, but asking for help with
        non-free Unix-workalikes such AIX system is. Solaris used to be
        just as offtopic, but OpenSolaris is not. From a technical point
        of view, these OSes have lots in common, yet their are
        irrelevant to the LUG's topic. This makes it apparent that it is
        freedom, and not any technical feature, that makes software
        pertinent to a LUG's work.
      * a large portion of the work of LUGs is telling people about Free
        Software. If they do so concentrating on "Linux", they are not
        only driving attention away from the important issues, they are
        even putting a large portion of their work at risk. Just as any
        other free program, the Linux kernel will not be with us
        forever: it may become obsolete, or a legal challenge may be
        successful and take it away from us to some extent. This would
        certainly affect Free Software, but it would not be a
        catastrophe: there are other free kernels, and Linux could be
        replaced without too much effort. The effect on communications,
        however, can be much larger: if LUGs have been telling people
        that "Linux is good for you", and all of a sudden Linux is no
        longer there, they must redo all the communication again.
      * the topic of LUGs is not at all restricted to operating systems,
        or to the GNU project. Questions about using non-GNU free
        programs such as OpenOffice.org or Mozilla on proprietary
        operating systems are welcome, and LUGs often help people start
        the way towards Free Software by installing free programs on
        whatever OS the user has on his or her machine.

By and by, LUGs in Latin America are coming to realize this, and
changing their names and communications to reflect the fact that they
are actually gathering around the Free Software concept, and not any
particular program or collection of programs.
-- 

Beatriz Busaniche       
FP 57F9 21EF B0C3 2A69 9EA0 D698 28D6 B8AE 2A7D 7321
Blog                    http://d-sur.net/bbusaniche
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