That's Stephen Adler, enjoying the view from Pikes Peak Colorado.
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This open K-12 petition drive project is the brain child of Stephen Adler. The project was
designed to meet two goals. First to give Stephen a chance to
exercises his newly acquired database/web integration skills. These
were acquired one afternoon after picking up two books, one on MySQL and the other on php. The other was to try get the
Internet community involved in the class action civil suit currently
in settlement negotiations. Setting up a petition web site was the
perfect outlet for these two goals.
The name for the petition drive was inspired by the fact that Stephen
enjoys spending his spare time promoting science and education through
his dialog with the GNU/Open Source community on the Internet. The
inspiration was also aided by the fact that when writing an email to the
nylug-talk@nylug.org mailing list, he needed a catchy name for the project,
when requesting someone to volunteer time to make a button logo for the
petition page. So Open K-12 popped into his mind has the words rolled
off his keyboard onto the e-mail.
Further motivation to setup this petition web site comes from the fact
that Stephen realized back in 1998, that there was a very close
parallel between how GNU/Open Source software is developed on the
Internet and how our society as a whole has progress throughout
history though its evolution of knowledge and our educational
system. Both being founded upon the free exchange of ideas. Stephen
wrote an article describing this titled, "Preserving the
Information Ecosystem". To his surprise, he has now heard, in
several discussions, the use of the term "Ecosystem" in reference to
the software development environment, in several ideological
discussions on the Internet. One such example was the
"Shared Source vs Open Source" debate held at the O'Reilly Open Source
Convention in San Diego on July 23-27, 2001. Be that as it may, when
he read about the settlement agreement, he could but help think about
all these students, in our underprivileged K-12 schools, being shown
to use computers subsidized by Microsoft, to operate Microsoft
software products and in effect training them to be perpetual
Microsoft software uses. The fact is, there is a whole world of
software alternatives and opportunities out there on the Internet to be
explored. The fact that Microsoft was targeting these students, was in
effect taking one step too far and Stephen had "to do something!".
And so this petition project came to life. The tools used are all
software products in which the source code is available through a
GNU or Open Source license. The web server, database server, scripting
language to process the mail signature verification, mail transport
agent, and computer operating system driving the computers to operate
this project are all Free. The term Free means both free as in zero
cost but most importantly, free as in freedom, the most important
concept as elaborated by Richard
Stallman and protected by the General Public License.
