At the September 17th meeting, John Moore surprised us with an audio/visual presentation by Lawrence Lessig from the July 24, 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Lessig's topic was "The End of Free Culture," a hair-raising review of the way in which the big publishers, the record industry, software developers (read Micro$oft), and the networks are manipulating Congress and shutting down the free exchange of creative work via indefinite extension of copyright and the infamous Digital Rights Management proposal. The very existence of Linux as well as the openness of the Internet are in peril and we'd better do something about it. The least we could do AND EVERY ONE OF US SHOULD DO SOMETHING is to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation to become better informed AND MAKE A CONTRIBUTION!

To get Lessig's lecture go to his web page Free Culture to download the lecture in 'Flash', MP3, text (for the bandwidth challenged, as he puts it).

Not only is John a great teacher, but the session was an example of the best of users groups in that a lot of informed input came from some of our more knowledgable members as well. You'll get a lot of what you missed if you look at John's notes which he kindly put in his Lessons in Linux under the topic of 'Linux Tour.'

John is a great believer in using the Internet resources for help with Linux, including Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition and UNIX Help for Users both of which are available on our Web Site at the links shown. He also reminded us that not only is there a man page for every BASH shell command (e.g. 'man ls') but there are dozens and dozens of 'How To' documents, not only on most Linux distributions CD's, but on the web at, for example, Sunsite's html listing but there are many others (try google with "Linux" and "HOWTO").