Our co-op has expressed an interested in developing an open and FOSS-friendly group for circuit riders. There are other UK circuit rider groups run by government-funded organisations, but they seem extremely hostile to FOSS and have forcibly removed support workers in secret.

You can subscribe pre-launch to the mailing list by emailing fossriders+subscribe@lists.software.coop - no launch date is set yet, but could this help achieve the infrastructure to provide user support?

Let me know if there’s any problem with it (surely everyone supports the .coop top-level by now?)

Fundamentally hardware suppliers need to be offering linux on their products, and unfortunately I don’t think this is happening enough at the moment, my observations are

- an open source operating system doesn’t seem to make the product much cheaper, and therefore more accessible
- I think Dell at some point in 2009 switched away from offering linux on their main notebook range, relegated to netbooks now
- open source needs to be better integrated into schools, so that people are used to alternatives to MS office
- lastly, a significant area of interest is undoubtably games, I wonder to what extent it puts the general user off when they find out they need windows to run most pc games…

Just spotted the group avatar wasn’t loading - just uploaded a new one. Feel free to change.