Marouen Bloggin' his Life

Today I noticed something odd and worrying. It’s the first time I make a deep tour around the university of Tunis (Faculté de Tunis). I used to know the area due to the rapid-post office there. But today it was a special tour. Besides going to grab a letter I received, I wanted to buy a book. Yes a book. And guess what ….. it wasn’t so easy.

It is evident to find a business/shopping center close to any university area (Campus) which comprises so many schools and teaches thousands of students everyday. What is odd is that, while looking for the book to buy, I was able to find only ONE bookshop in that center. Not being able to find the book in French, I decided to have a tour in the center in order to find another bookshop. These are my non-accurate statistics about what I found instead: 6 coffee-shops, 1 smoky “salons de thé” (tea saloons), more than 20 copy-centers, 6 fastfood restaurants, 5 “bureaux de gravure” (CD burning shops). I’m wondering if the cyber-café is still there because I can’t see its signs anymore.

The copy-centers were full of students, with copies of book covers in the windows advertising the copies of books they have ready for “sale”: Maths, computing, accounting, law …. The “Gravure” shops advertising the last DVD of games, movies, ‘Lost’ and ‘Dr. house’ season, software packages ….

I’m not going to say that I never printed a book or bought a CD when I was student and before the democratization of the invention called “Internet”. What really makes me sad is to notice that, having a bookshop close to the university became a failing business. Tomorrow I’ll have to go downtown to one of the rare bookshops still standing the ‘cloning’ fashion.

Ciao, sono sempre io, lo stesso marouen, lo stesso tunisino e sempre dello stesso paese, la Tunisia. Non so perche scrivo in italiano questo messaggio. Forse perche ho avuto un bisogno urgente di parlare in italiano, di scrivere in italiano, di ricordare l’italiano che non ho più usato da quando ho lasciato in liceo. Magari é perché ho visto che ho ogni settimana più d’italiani che leggiono il mio blog dell’Italia anche se ho sempre scritto in inglese. Oppure perché ho avuto l’idea che nessuno nella blogsfera (se questa parole esiste) tunisina nessuno non l’ha mai fatto (non sono securo). Comunque sono contento di poter’ ancora esprimermi in italiano anché se sono certo che farò un sacco di sbagli ma questo non mi preoccupa molto. Non so se scriverò ancora in italiano nel futuro ma almeno posso dire che sono orgoglioso di questo piccolo paragrafo che significa molto per me perché amo molto la lingua italiana che ho imparato della TV prima del francese oppure l’inglese. Mia madre dira anche che l’ho imparato prima dell’arabo.

Allora a presto !!!

While waiting my computer which is downloading a website of 800 Mb (hopefully through FTP), I had the idea of writing a post about a through I had 2 days ago.

This post is related to the seminar I’ve attended a week ago in my ex-university INSAT . This seminar was about the FLOSS: Integration or Migration. Without getting into technical explanations about this huge discussion of IT people (like me), I wanted to share a funny analogy which went through my mind linking this topic to what happened few weeks ago in the surroundings of some big cities in France.

All these events were described as the result of years of fury of immigrants’ families for all the issues of integration and acceptance they are facing everyday especially during the latest years. Let’s try to have this image of analogy:

• The French government is the IT manager
• The historical “Europeans” inhabitants of France are the proprietary softwares
• The immigrants are the FLOSS

Let’s now try to translate some IT sentences into our topic:

• The original inhabitants of France are almost only Europeans
• Previous information systems were running only proprietary softwares

• For historical and economical reasons, France was welcoming many immigrants from especially the African continent to work on the industry
• FLOSS started getting into information systems for especially economical reasons (not only)

• The problem of the French government is how to integrate the immigrants into the French society
• The problem of IT managers is how to integrate the FLOSS into the information systems to work with the proprietary softwares

• A lot “original inhabitants” activists are afraid of loosing the “original” French identity in case that immigrants will be well integrated
• Proprietary softwares editors are afraid that FLOSS will invade their markets and stop their monopoly of knowledge and technology.

I will leave for you the translation of this sentence: “some people are convinced that the best thing to do is to migrate completely to FLOSS”