FMB, speech synthesis, eler, explaining freedom

The audience responses to FOSS Means Business were really positive. Perens’ delivery was as good as I expected, and the content of his talk was better than I expected. I think everyone liked him. To me, Stallman’s talk did not seem well adapted to the business audience, but all the comments I got afterward were positive. There were a lot of "he actually had good points", and many other comments with the word "actually" in them.

Recordings of both should appear online, but it will be a slow process unfortunately.

Organising FOSS Means Business, I hit a lot of situations where free software had to be explained to someone who didn’t care too much. I got more practice this evening when my uncle asked me what I do. So I’ve started a new rewording of the intro of my homepage, using a new approach which talks about "a minimum standard for rights for software users" – instead of mentioning "free".

I met someone who hadn’t heard of the Everyone Loves Eric Raymond web comic, so I thought I should pass that link on.

Myself and others from IFSO had Sunday lunch with Fernanda Weiden of FSFLA. We discussed organising some future events in Ireland.

Last thing: I didn’t know there was free software speech synthesis programs but today I found Festival and Flite.