Intentions Clarified - Battle Lines Drawn
May 14th, 21:50 UTC
It has been a wild day for friends of FOSS. This past weekend was the opening of qualifications for this year's Indianapolis 500 race; a venue where Linux can introduce itself to much of the world. 22 cars are now qualified, and 11 spots remain open in the field. Today also marks the beginning of active warfare on the Open Source community by none other than Microsoft.
Note: This should replace an earlier press release regarding First Week Qualifications at Indianapolis. It has been re-written.
 It has been a wild day for friends of FOSS. This past weekend was the opening of qualifications for this year's Indianapolis 500 race; a venue where Linux can introduce itself to much of the world. 22 cars are now qualified, and 11 spots remain open in the field. Today also marks the beginning of active warfare on the Open Source community by none other than Microsoft.
Saturday and Sunday went by with little fanfare for the Linux-sponsored Chastain Motorsports team, although the team logged a lot of laps, in an effort to get the car up to speed to qualify next weekend. For those who don't know how things work at Indy, there are 4 days of qualifications. Two down, two to go.
The team found their best lap of the month near the end of the day on Sunday, a lap of 220.243 mph. This shows that they are making steady improvements to the car, and based on the rate of progress they have made so far, they should be able to find 1 or 2 more mph before Saturday. This would safely land the car in the race.
Monday and Tuesday of this week, the track is closed, so we won't have a lot of news to report. But Wednesday, the track re-opens, and we should be able to see what kind of progress has been made on the car setup.
On Tux500's progress, I'm sorry to report that we're currently falling well short of where we want to be. We've collected just over $12,000 to date. From a community this large and diverse, and for a campaign that has already given Linux some amazing exposure, we feel like we could be doing much better.
From a personal standpoint, I feel like we're letting the team down. Tom Chastain has put a lot of faith in our community, and has given us prime placement on the car. For the amount of money we've raised, it's much more than we deserve. Tom likes what we're trying to do... he likes being associated with the "Little Guy," and he likes the fact that this is a community effort. But racing takes money... a lot more than the amount we've raised.
That said, I still believe strongly in this community. This is a group of people who have overcome amazing odds time and time again. It's a community that has built an amazing operating system, and has flourished both due to and in spite of its amazing diversity. In light of the recent threats coming from Redmond, the time for us to come together is now. We can't be divided and stand against this giant, and I feel now more that ever that in order to stand up against them, we need to tell people our story.
I believe we can come together to make this program a success and show the world the unity within the community.
I believe we can make Linux a part of everyone's vocabulary, grow it's share on the desktop, and defend ourselves from the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt being cast upon us by Microsoft.
And I believe we can, and should, reward the racing team that took a huge chance on us, and gave us a venue to showcase what we have to offer to the world.
You can read more Tux500 news at http://blog.tux500.com
(Submitted by Bob Moore of Tux 500 Project)
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