Free Software in the big press
El Pais is the best selling
newspaper in Spain, and every Sunday they include a few pages about business, including
job advertisements, interviews, etc. The surprise was while reading yesterday’s
business pages and finding an article from Jesús González Barahona, one of the first
persons in Spain that started promoting Free Software, many years ago, while we were
all still in elementary school.
It is not the first time Linux is mentioned on those business pages, but it is the first
time, IIRC, that a so well known person in the Spanish Free Software community writes an
article there. The article wasn’t about Linux, but about Free Software, competence, freedom
and the business models that can be created around it. This is indeed another huge step,
since that article will be read by millions of people hopefully.
Olympic Games
End of the Olympic Games, sadly. The best, in my opinion, the gold medal
in basketball for Argentina (largely deserved, after the controversy in last
World Cup final, where Argentina should have won if the referees had done their
job correctly), the two gold medals by El Guerrouj, and the gold medal in
Gymnastics by Gervasio Deferr. The worst, as I already said here, the
7th place of the Spanish basketball team, with only one game lost, while
all other teams have lost at least two 🙁 If it hadn’t have to play against
USA in 1/4 finals, I’d be probably today with a huge hang-over because of
the celebration of the gold medal.
About the Spanish performance, I have to rectify my words,
since at the end, Spain had 19
medals. Still far away from top-level European
countries like France, Germany or Italy (and of course Russia), but wasn’t that bad,
even making it better than other countries supposed to be more developed than Spain,
like Canada, Norway and others.