[Comm] [JT] [brutal offtopic] Sumerians and OSS :-)

[Alexandre Prokoudine <avp@altlinux.ru>]

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Привет,

Полез я тут на домашнюю страничку автора целого сонма
LADSPA-модулей, Стива Харриса (http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/), и
прочитал вот это:

Who or what is inanna?

Inanna is my desktop Linux box. She's a dual PIII something-or-other
with a lot of RAM.

The name comes from a woman in ancient Sumer (in-between where Iran
and Iraq are now) who lived around 5000 BCE. To cut long story
short, the ancient Sumerians used a set of clay tablets with simple,
algorithmic instructions on them to decide when to plant crops and
so on, but these tablets were held by the central government. Inanna
conned, tricked or persuaded (legends vary) the guy who was
responsible for maintaining them into letting her take a copy of
them, and then distributed the copies to each city and put them in
public view. I think of her as the first Free Software activist. ;-)

No-one seems to know much about the Sumerians, what was once Sumer
is now pretty inhospitable, but several of their cities still
survive and there is pitifully little archeology going on. They had
a really advanced civilization long before the Egyptians, and had
some advanced scientific knowledge compared with the ancient Greeks
and Romans.

-- 
Alexandre Prokoudine
ALT Linux Documentation Team
JID: avp@altlinux.org

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