I am a new person joined to the list. Generally, its been only a few months since I have taken interest in the field of free software. Initially I started searching on the net for more information about the free software and I saw the mailing list. I found certain difficulties and errors on the links relating to the mailing lists of fsf-india. The site which should be the face of free software in India seems to be in a badly managed state.
The links to the archives of the following lists fsf-India, fsf-discuss, fsf-friends, fsf-locale, fsf-dev, and the others on the mailing list page of gnu.org.in points to a ftp mode view where I don't directly the get the archives (http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/). Then going through a list of the folders the specific mailing list archives are found in a folder with the name of the list. Generally I havent seen any oranizations site allowing an ftp view of its contents. The complete raw archive's of lists are also provided at the same directory in a [folder of the list].mbox . Also any other person coming to site would also see so many innumearable mailing lists on the page. Also this would tempt him into going to the other mailing lists archives on the page and could give the site a bad impression. Also looking on the page, I would like to ask if the fsf-india doesnt have enough money to host its site and its mailing lists on its own server. Because there are so many other mailing lists on the server on which the mm.gnu.org.in is hosted. The server seems to be public server.
Well this is only half the problem.
Going through the mailing lists fsf-India, fsf-discuss, fsf-friends and other lists maintained by fsf-india, I was shocked to see that some of the archives were removed. For instance a look at fsf-india list shows that this list was started in january 2000 and the next mail comes in may 2001. What has happened in between for 17 months is a blank. But the saga continues again in june 2002 to november 2002.I don't think that nothing has been done during that time because the archives just before the missing date and just after the missing date tells that there was continuation. This not an isolated case. Take a look at fsf-discuss.it has only seven archive listing. And the fsf-locale stands with only 2 nad so on with other lists like fsf-dev. The fsf-friends is the only one untainted. I use a mozilla firefox and i dont think that my browser is deniying these requests to me.
I belive that free software is my right and everyone using free software is a part of the organization Free Software Foundation India. The fsf ought to be more transparent in its working. The Free Software Foundation stands for freedom and the Free Software ethics is always against denial of freedom to any one. Then how come the symbol of freedom denies the right for me to gain access to the archives? Does the free software foundation wish to hide something done in the past ? Why such oppression ?
Anwar