Anyone alerting the local media/computing media or eveen the other local user groups to this meeting? The other user groups might find it interesting (ie pc/windows, Mac etc) Cheers... david -----Original Message----- On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 16:47 +1300, Greig McGill wrote:

Hi WLUG, and other interested parties.

In an effort to step outside our little box, and to encourage members of the WLUG to consider the political aspects of Open Source, I have asked Rodney Hide to come and speak to us.

He will be speaking this Thursday evening (the 18th) at 8pm at our usual meeting location - Lit.B. at the University of Waikato. A map is at: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/perl-bin/map/tt-map.pl?term=litb

Mr. Hide is, as you will all be aware, the leader of the ACT party. He posts a regularly updated blog at http://www.rodneyhide.com, and he is all in favour of Open Source software.

This meeting is open to all, so please, bring a friend. It'll be the least "geeky" meeting we are likely to have until Nandor Tanczos joins us sometime next year (yes, really - I like to hear both sides of an argument - how about you?) so you are welcome to bring people who may have been scared away by the more technical meetings.

Supporting Open Source software is one thing (perhaps the only one) that Rodney Hide and Nandor Tancos agree on - witness this press release from Nandor Tancos today. I don´t suppose you could get Nandor to come as well - think of the headlines in the local media ¨Open Source unites sworn enemies¨ ..... 15 November 2004 Cut costs at IT giants' expense, not students Green Tertiary Education and IT Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos is hailing Victoria University's move to open source servers and suggests that Waikato University look at following suit. Both varsities have announced today that they need to reduce costs, but while Vic is achieving this by moving its admin, finance and HR systems to servers running the open source software 'Red Hat Linux', Waikato is instead looking at reducing staff numbers by doing some jobs less often and reviewing student-staff ratios. "Congratulations to Victoria for choosing to balance their budget by reducing how much money they give to multinational corporations; Waikato should follow their example instead of compromising the quality of their students' education," said Nandor, who is a Waikato graduate and lives in Hamilton. "Waikato prides itself for being a hot bed of innovation, but this time Victoria are the ones using their imagination and lateral thinking to look at the overall picture. "Tertiary institutions nationwide should take note of Victoria's move. Open source is a cheaper option all round and the education sector making greater use of it would benefit institutions, their students and the local software industry."

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