Today’s Wrox event

This evening Foyle’s Bookshop in London held a “networking event” featuring a number of people from the Wrox publishing company and its new owners, Wiley. I had meetings with some of the representatives as well as one of its authors, Kapil Sharma, who co-authored their book on Red Hat Linux 9 and
a book on Fedora Core
2, the latest version of what used to be Red Hat Linux.

I spoke with one of their editors, who asked me for books I’d like to see brought out, and I suggested books on KDE programming and Python as there is simply no book around on the first subject, and a shortage of good books on the second. I also asked Kapil Sharma about rumours of Fedora causing major problems when installing it alongside another operating system, and he said the problems had been ironed out in the final release. (When the issue came up on OSNews, some people said things like “it destroys Windows – isn’t that a good thing?”. No it isn’t, especially if it’s someone else’s computer.)

The one thing I didn’t like about this event was the food and wine that was available. But it gave me the idea to set up a group for Muslims to promote the use of, and involvement in, open source software among us. This would insha Allah lessen the dependence Muslim businesses have on certain US corporations, particularly in the Muslim world where this software is well beyond the means of most people. We could develop a Linux (or BSD) distribution centred towards one or more of the languages of the Muslim world and sell it much cheaper than Windows – and it’s a lot more reliable
and secure too. The editor I spoke to, when I told him that I no longer connected systems running Windoze to the internet (because of the near certainty of getting a virus), he told me that he had heard of someone get a virus the first time he connected to the net – trying to get Windoze updates, and the reason most people get these at all is – security!