Grants

Mit Rowe mit at mitayai.org
Sun Dec 5 18:12:47 PST 2004


Hi, folks!

I'm Mit, and i've been your ca.FreeBSD.Org hostmaster for many years. 
I'm pretty quiet on a international scale, but i've been active as a 
local  advocate for the FreeBSD community in every community i have 
involvement in since a copy of FreeBSD 2.0 landed on my desk in early '95.

I have also considered it my duty to encourage FreeBSD mirrors in 
Canada, but I have been constantly frustrated by my ability to have 
corporations provide long-term resources to the FreeBSD Project in terms 
of WWW, FTP, and CVSUp mirrors of the FreeBSD releases, source, and 
documentation.

This frustration has led me to think of turning to the government of 
Canada, starting from the Communications Research Centre (an agency of 
Industry Canada) and working my way up, looking for either them to host 
the FreeBSD mirror or provide a grant to someone to do so.

However, before i speak for the FreeBSD Project, i believe that i am 
honour-bound to request feed back on my intent and method; therefore, i 
ask your feedback, comments and advice on the following letter i think i 
should send first to info at crc.ca and see what kind of feedback i receive 
from them (which i would report back).

Also, perhaps any lurking Canadians out there could hold up their hands? 
I sometimes feel pretty lonely out here in this corner of the world :-)

Regards,
Mit

Here's the text of the letter in English (i'm also going to write it in 
French, our other language of government in Canada, in case any of the 
potential readers are francophone). Please comment as soon as possible.

=====


My name is William Rowe, commonly known as Mit Rowe, and i am a Canadian 
member of the FreeBSD community and serve in the capacity of Hostmaster 
for the FreeBSD Subdomain.

FreeBSD is, as the website http://www.freebsd.org/ describes,

"...an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium 
and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), 
Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived 
from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of 
California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of 
individuals 
<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/index.html>. 
Additional platforms <http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/index.html> are 
in various stages of development." It is a freely available, opensource 
operating system with no restrictions on commercial use. More 
information of the licenses can be found at 
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html. The core 
documentation of FreeBSD is available in both national languages, as are 
large chunks of ancillary documentation.

I have worked in the ISP and IT industries for over a decade, and am 
well aware of the prevalent use of FreeBSD in Canada, in both the 
private and public sectors in corporations large and small, Internet 
Service Providers and non-profit, charitable, governmental and 
educational institutions.

The level of interest and use warrants the existence of resources to 
install, configure, maintain, upgrade and support the operating system, 
which can be done through the allocation of resources for mirroring the 
FreeBSD source and documentation in order to make more efficient use of 
global Internet resources.

The use of public funds to support a free platform which runs much of 
the infrastructure of our nation is both a way of supporting the 
existing infrastructure and making it easier for Canadians to support 
and further develop this technology, and will also serve to help 
increase and support our international reputation as a center for 
Technology and Communications, and the pride that we IT professionals 
feel in for the country which we are honoured to be able to call our home.

With respect,
Will Mitayai Keeso Rowe
Toronto, ON
mitayai at ca.freebsd.org








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