Hi, As some persons asked for more informations aroudn tropheesdulibre, here are some. 1st of all, i put a scanned trophy. As you can see, it's awful. It's due to the fact that it's done in plexiglass, on 3 differents parts, for 10cm depth. quite hard to scan, I couldn't do better, sorry. 1st of all, I arrived 1 day before the ceremony. It was quite a good idea : I met some really nice hackers from other projects, and some ppl involved in free software. We went to bed at 11:30PM, and 3 of us stayed till 1AM to install the new-top-wonderful-wifi-card-with-pcmcia_ps-patched-kernel. I went to bed :-) Then, it was time for the "tropheesdulibre" day... Around 250 persons were here. Many hackers, with debian of deCss t-shirts, and many businessmen too. 9:00 -> 9:30 : RMS evangelist was here to say once more that freedom was more important than anything else (I must admit that even if I have respect for RMS, I think that his speech was not productive for business men/women). 9:30->10:30 : roberto DiCosmo had a very interesting speech (i think everybody know this guy ? In france, he's well known anyway). something around "why will free software win". 11:00-> 12:30 : time with journalists. With a very very interesting speech from M. Lang, french scientist from CNRS, about free software economy. To resume, he said "when you share something like your bred, you loose some. but when you share your software, you earn more than you loose". 12:30-> 14:00 : time for lunch. With lot of alcool I didn't drink (alcool makes me ill) :-) 14:00-> 16:00 : time for trophy. I don't think it was a nice ceremony. Some interesting speechs, but the interviewer asked always the same questions. 16:00-> 18:00 : eating again :-) 18:00-> ... trying to go back home. But my 1st train was late, so I failed to have my 2nd one and had to stay in Paris for the night. My experience : I met some really interesting ppl : * The hacker that works on abuledu : a specific linux distro based on mandrake, that is builded for french schools. He plans to add Koha on AbulEdu in the near future. * Some journalists that will write a paper about Koha. They work on very specific news that are only for public agencies. So it's really more interesting than being in linuxworld or something like that. * A company that is involved only in free software, and has some contacts with public agencies libraries. As a conclusion : it was a very interesting meeting for business purposes for me. And we won !!! I have to say many thanks to steve that subscribed for all of us :-) An important news, about something else : In France, there is a very famous and important customer association (UFC-Que choisir). They announced yesterday that they attacked in justice (approximative translation...) 5 "majors" (EMI Music France, Warner Music France, Universal Pictures Vidéo, Auchan, FNAC) because of their copy-protection on recent CD that makes them unuseable on some recent equipements. It's the 1st stage of a more global lobbying action against the EUCD (european version of dmca) UFC is a very important association here in France : every radio or TV news speaks of this action. they have a very good press-relation manager. The court decision will occur at end of june. UFC is known to attack only when sure to win. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
