Fsf-friends October 2003

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

15 participants
21 discussions

To open software within three years
by Manjush G.Menon 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

Original Message ----- From: "IT@School" <itschool(a)asianetindia.com> To: <manjushmenon(a)hotmail.com> Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 5:08 PM Subject: Reply > Mr.Manjush G. Menon > We are not giving to depend totally on Ms. Products. Rather MS > Office is taught along with open office and Windows along with Linux > from this year. Arranging the resource persons for training an open > software, making available the software, the maintenance of a help desk > etc. are logistical issues which could not be immediately undertaken. > We plan switch out to open software within three years. > Executive Director > ---- Original Message ----- From: Manjush G. Menon To: itschool(a)asianetindia.com Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 5:46 PM Subject: Respected sir, From Manjush G. Menon, Sr.Programmer, Sofker Solutions Pvt Ltd, Kochi-18. To The Executive Director, 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project, SCERT Buildings, Poojapura, Thiruvananthapuram-12. Respected sir, SUB: In protest against the inclusion of products from multinational companies in the syllabus of 'IT @ SCHOOL' It's a very dissappointing fact that when the whole world is moving towards Free software, we at kerala are going behind a major MNC - Microsoft. I hereby register my protest in such an act from 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project team. Breaking of prototypes will definetly help us in finding economical and high quality products for our future generation. For students and programmers, the GNU Linux contains 'GNU Compiler Collections' which includes C, C++, FORTRAN, PERL, TCL etc. Also, for DTP and other publishing purposes, it includes GNU Office utilities like Abi-Word, gedit, and other worksheet utilities, all these with a nominal cost of Rs 700-800/-. The software as it is, is free and the cost is accounted towards the media (CD + Documentation) included. By this letter, I urge you to take this matter seriously and suggest necessary modifications in the action plan of 'IT @ SCHOOL' project. Wishing you all the best and wishing all 'Students @ SCHOOL' a bright future, Thanking you, Yours faithfully Manjush G. Menon. ______________________________________________________ Check out all the latest outrageous email attachments on the Outrageous Email Chart! - http://viral.lycos.co.uk

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PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha 16 Sep '04

16 Sep '04

Thanks to George Lessard for posting this across. FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva is pushing legislation to obligate all public institutions to convert exclusively to open-source software. Open-source programs, embodied by the Linux operating system, have underlying code available to anyone who wants to modify or customize it. Such software, in unadorned form, can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Villanueva hopes his measure triggers activity in Peru's software industry by freeing programmers from the constraints of working with coding controlled by a few large companies. Open-source could take the expense out of software upgrades; which is important for a country like Peru that owes about $30 million in overdue software license fees. [SOURCE: San Jose Mercury, AUTHOR: Associated Press] (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3531007.htm)

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WSF
by Arun M 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

World Social Forum and FSF India. http://www.gnu.org.in/fsfiwsf.html Background The World Social Forum, 2004 is being held at Mumbai, India, from January 16th to 21st. Click here for more details about the event. Free Software Foundation of India, as an organization committed to promoting and propagating swatantra software in India is organizing seminars on free software at the WSF. Details will be posted here soon. The WSF, according to its charter, is " ... an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and inter-linking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo- liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a society centred on the human person". We are seeking active participation from all people interested in helping us. You can help us in the form of:- 1. Monetary Contributions - we need funds to cover the travel expenses of volunteers for FSF - India at the WSF 2. Hardware loans - the FSF - India is planning to put up stalls for demonstrating free software at the venue. We require hardware for demonstrating capabilities of free software. 3. Volunteers - people to run the stall the FSF-India will be putting up at the venue of WSF India; volunteers should be well versed in the concepts and philosophy of free software and also should be able to demonstrate software and applications to visitors -- a thorough knowledge of the GNU history and philosophy pages is required. If you can help in any way, including, but not restricted to above, please feel free to mail us at gnu at gnu dot org dot in. -- Arun M <arun(a)gnu.org.in> FSF India

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LFY GNU/Linux Asia meet in Delhi...
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

This offer is from the editor of Linux For You. Would FSF-India be interested? FN On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, rahul wrote: > From: rahul [mailto:rahul@efyindia.com] > Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 5:41 PM > To: 'Frederick Noronha (FN)' > Subject: RE: For Rahul (LFY) > > > Hi Fred,... > > As for Free Software--we surely could provide a free stall booth to free > software team. As soon as the forms are ready, will have those sent to > you--with no payments involved....

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A shut Gates on open source
by V. Sasi Kumar 27 Oct '03

27 Oct '03

This is a report from the Australian press. V. Sasi Kumar A shut Gates on open source James Riley OCTOBER 23, 2003 MICROSOFT founder and chairman Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open source software. In an interview with The Australian at the Microsoft Office System launch in New York, Mr Gates said any such moves by government were wrongheaded and would result in a reduction in public sector productivity. Mr Gates claimed the open source system was "inferior" and said it represented a false economy in relation to lost opportunities to improve productivity. "Our position is that organisations should simply buy the best software for their situation," he said. "Forcing people to use software that is inefficient? Do you want your Government to be efficient? "Governments are very information-driven. They are not factories. It's all just information," he said. In the past 10 months, politicians at various levels in Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea and Japan have suggested that government procurement procedures should mandate at least the consideration of open source alternatives to reduce overall IT costs. China, South Korea and Japan have outlined tentative plans to design their own open source operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows and applications to compete with Microsoft Office as a means of reducing IT pressures on the public purse. "I think it's just commonsense that people won't choose to use inferior software. People want their tax dollars to go as far as possible, and in most cases they will see more value in the offerings that we provide," Mr Gates said. The Australian Government, particularly the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and various health agencies had invested heavily in XML-based technologies and processes. Mr Gates said the argument that its software was too expensive was simply wrong. And despite complaints from some Third World governments about Microsoft's global pricing - where the company's software essentially carries the same list price wherever it is sold -- he maintains the company has been the primary driver in pushing down the cost of IT systems. "Our business model is entirely oriented toward high volume, low price," Mr Gates said. "In any IT project, our software is going to be just 1 or 2 per cent of (the project cost)." Meanwhile, Mr Gates has renewed Microsoft's recent pledges to radically improve its security procedures in conjunction with the rest of the industry following the unprecedented levels of virus and worm outbreaks in recent months. "This is a case where the industry and Microsoft need to do better, (although) the vast majority of our customers have not been affected by these problems," Mr Gates said. "But we take responsibility for the fact that it was too hard for people to know whether they had their firewalls up the right way, and that it was too hard for them to keep their (security patch) software up to date. "If we can make those (functions) incredibly easy, then we'll bring down the scale of these incidents and the frequency very dramatically." He said that improving security on all Microsoft functions had been made a primary focus of the company's $US6 billion ($8.6 billion) research and development budget.

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An open letter to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Letter
by Soundara Rajan N.S 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

An open letter to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Letter By newsdesk(a)theinquirer.net The Letterman: Saturday 25 October 2003, 15:16 Messrs William Gates Jnr & Steven Ballmer Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond Washington, USA Dear Sirs I see you have been active again in making interesting and to some degree highly amusing statements about Free/Libre Open Source Software and the many and varied people who make up its community. I in particular would like to thank Mr. Steven Ballmer for your entertaining exposee of Linux's deepest, darkest secret - that it can seriously worry the senior executive of a convicted predatory monopoly, without that ever having been the intention of its principal software designer and initial developer. I would also like to thank you for humming and hawing around the question of the release of source code to people who can use it, in the light of the new MVP source code entitlement program. Well, are they deserving members of the Windows development team or not? In relation to your comments, Steve Ballmer, on Linux's "road map", I will refrain from expounding on Linus Torvalds' comment on the cover of one of Bill Gates' books, showing him standing in the middle of an empty road. It's not nice to make jokes like that, is it, Your Billness? Road kill is no joke, even if some enterprising chef has written a book about it. No, I have something else on my mind, something much more worthy. I would like to challenge you to a software coding bake-out, a bet to see which methodology works, and which doesn't. You have made some progress with your NT source tree, anyone can see that - Windows 2k3 is a more serious product than Windows XP, and definitely a more realistic - and much more massive - product than Windows 95. Congratulations. You have also declared that Windows 95, Windows NT 3.x and NT 4.x are discontinued, end-of-line, unsupported products. And Windows 98 is shortly going to be in the same category, having already been discontinued. And Microsoft is attempting to roll the Win9x features into the NT line. XP is the nearest you have come to success. In the process, Windows users have enjoyed an interesting remote use of RPC and other features that might otherwise bug you. And in the process you have put back Longhorn's release date. My challenge is this - release the entire range of discontinued, end-of-line and unsupported Operating Systems mentioned above (Win9x, NT 3.x and Win4.x) and their related utilities and Productivity Applications, as Open Source under the BSD/MIT license, since you have stated at sundry times and in diverse manners that that license is one you can live with. You are of course expected to sanitise the source trees - we don't want trouble with absurd IP cases. Release the sanitised source trees, minus any bits and pieces of third-party encumbered code Microsoft may have in the Win9x and NT 3.x and 4.x source trees, to the ftp servers at the MIT, ibiblio, the U of Calif. at Berkeley, and the U of Cambridge, UK, with prominent notices stating that they are released under the terms of the BSD/MIT licenses placed in slashdot.org, newsforge.com, computerworld.com, news.com.com, www.theinquirer.net and www.theregister.co.uk and other industry news outlets. My bet is that in the time it takes Microsoft to come up with a half-way decent Windows product, the Open Source development process starting from an earlier, identical initial source tree without constraints will produce one better. The length of time is going to be the same. On one side you have the multi-billion dollar transnational corporation, on the other you have an amorphous world-wide community. One has a head start, but the code bases for this challenge are the same. The only catch - Microsoft is not allowed to use the source code produced by the open source effort until after it has rolled out Longhorn - thus preserving the independence of the challengers, who will not have access to the Longhorn source tree. After the challenge has finished and the bets have been tallied up, then it is a totally different story, because the BSD/MIT license doesn't prohibit incorporation within a closed-source code base, only the denial of attribution. But should Microsoft use the independent effort's code during such a challenge, it would be an admission that the Free/Libre Open Source community is right, and must be met with an appropriate forfeit - the sanitising and opening of the Longhorn source tree. I propose in the interim that the challenge in the interim be named something other than Windows or Office - precisely what will have to be decided upon later. So, there you have it. Are either of you betting men, able to face a challenge? Yours Sincerely Wesley Parish (wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz) Source: http://www.theInquirer.net/?article=12331

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Microsoft selling anti-Linux speech on CD
by Soundara Rajan N.S 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

Microsoft selling anti-Linux speech on CD Volish partners to pay for brainwash? By Fernando Cassia: Wednesday 22 October 2003, 13:30 "Public relations wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony 'grass-roots' front groups, and conspire with lobbyists". "Toxic Sludge is Good for You: lies, damn lies, and the Public Relations Industry". IT IS NOT news that Microsoft would like to see the Linux airship go down in flames like the Hindenburg. In June 2001, the PR wizards at the Vole's Marketing Department created a document titled 'Partner Guide: Competing with Linux'. It was a training course for Microsoft partners who were obviously getting increasing competition from Linux. That document was dissected and debunked at the time. But now some of our readers whispered to us that Microsoft is selling an updated -we guess- version of this marketing weapon of mass destruction, in the form of a CD-ROM disc to their "Business Partners" which is linked from the web page dedicated to the company's sales and marketing efforts..... Read more at http://www.theInquirer.net/?article=12276

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Re: [fsug-kochi-discuss]Re: Can you pleaze help me ?
by Biju G C 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

--- "Mahesh T. Pai" <paivakil(a)vsnl.net> wrote: > > I recall that it used to ISO 8859 or some such. Yes the HTML says "charset=iso-8859-1", but they are using something else cheers Biju ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk

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Re: Can you pleaze help me ?
by Biju G C 23 Oct '03

23 Oct '03

Hi all, Can somebody tell me is it possible to view http://www.madhyamamonline.com/ in GNU/Linux If so how? I tried installing http://www.madhyamamonline.com/font.zip Their FAQ tell it is not possible to view in netscape. If I know the "char-set encoding" used I can http://www.madhyamamonline.com/ my mozilla extension to do auto switching http://downloads.us-east3.mozdev.org/quicktools/AutoCharacterCoding.xpi --- nasir nasir <kollathodi(a)yahoo_com> wrote: hi biju, Sorry if I am wrong to contact you for this. But I came across your name while googling for a malayalam font issue.(http://gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2003-October/001214.html). I was unable to view malayalam fonts in my GNU/Linux and thanx to your hack, its working now. But I still have a problem, even though I am able to view most of the sites like www.manoramaonline.com, I am unable to get www.madhyamamonline.com with this. I think they use different character set. I have downloaded and installed the font also. Still not working. Could you please check and suggest me what to do ? I am not a web designer and not familiar with these language settings and all. So plesae ignore this mail if its something trivial. Once again thanx for your great work. Regards, Nasirudheen ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk

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Celebrate with free software
by Ramanraj K 22 Oct '03

22 Oct '03

Dear Countrymen, There is perhaps no other nation that remembers and celebrates freedom as much as we do. Diwali reminds us about the the end of the cruel demon, who finally wished that we rejoice his gory conquest and the triumph of freedom, with sweets and festivities. Free software is yet another reason we have to celebrate, not once a year but every moment of consciousness. It heralds in an era when we can find freedom from the modern day demons of corruption, concoction, commission, collection, concession, capitation, congestion, cunningmen, chickenmen, and cynicalmen. We could call all these together as c10n. This is c10n - version 1.0, updates are welcome! Regards, K. Ramanraj.

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Fsf-friends October 2003