[dundee] RMS giving a talk at RIT (New York State)

[Andrew Clayton]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:01:44 +0000, gordon dunlop wrote:

> On 30 January 2010 21:33, Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:46:01 +0000, gordon dunlop wrote:
> >
> > > Richard Stallman will be giving a talk next month at the Rochester
> > > Institute of Technology (State of New York), one thing that
> > > interests me (from Red Hat/Fedora blogs) is the way that
> > > GNU/Linux speakers are welcomed at a lot of North American
> > > Universities and is actively encouraged (Universities in North
> > > America have no hang ups with Unix/Linux systems), I wonder if
> > > RMS or any other major FOSS speaker would get the same reception
> > > within the UK University circuit.
> >
> > Saw RMS at Edinburgh University a few years back.
> >
> >   You mean 27th May 2004

Correct, I still have the original TayLUG mail announcing it.
Message-ID: <20040510175343.GD19313 at muse.19inch.net>

>  http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/lectures/
> 
> Edinburgh University is an exception where open source is actively
> encouraged and has won an open source award, I am talking in general
> about Universities within the UK

I wouldn't particularly know if Edinburgh University constitutes a _typical_ UK
University or not. I know at Southampton University we were using Linux and 
Apache, Squid on the Sun and SGI box's and Samba. (naturally I was a big supporter 
of that) and after I left they set up a large Beowulf cluster and got themselves an Altix. 
We were using mostly Sun and SGI kit. And of course SGI switched from MIPS/Irix to 
IA64/Linux. And off the top if my head, Exim came out of Cambridge University.

Getting back on topic, RMS he has at least been to Manchester University in 2008[0] 
and got a honorary doctorate from Glasgow University in 2001[1]

I also don't know what a typical Computing course looks like these days. The year I graduated from Abertay they showed us the next years curriculum and it seemed pretty Microsoft and Java biased. And while I was there they had starting getting a lot more windows based stuff replacing the VAXCluster and such.

[0] http://manchester.fsuk.org/blog/2008/04/13/richard-stallman-1st-may/
[1] http://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archive/2001/february/headline_29920_en.html


Andrew