Fsf-friends June 2007

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

45 participants
59 discussions

Why DRM won't ever work
by Praveen A 07 Jun '07

07 Jun '07

Another interesting article from Jeremy Allison (he had written earlier about the document lockup with MS Office 2007) " ... Sure, there's gobs and gobs of extra software in the process which is usually run at the consumer end of the deal, trying to obfuscate and hide the fact that the consumer possesses all the information needed to decrypt the file they've just been given. They have to have been given this, else they can't listen to the song or watch the movie. Claiming that this process can ever be made secure from the people you've just given all this information to is like believing you can create a secure bank vault by drawing chalk lines on the pavement, piling the money inside and asking customers to "respect these boundaries". The media industries are trying to sell what they consider to be valuable data without any means of prohibiting access to it. This is not a business model that is ever going to work." http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6189011.html?tag=nl.e550 -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Re: [Debian-in-workers] Red Hat signs MoU with Kerala govt
by Praveen A 07 Jun '07

07 Jun '07

2007/6/7, Mahesh T. Pai <paivakil(a)gmail.com>: > I understand your feelings. I know that you have put in a log of > efforts into the IT@SCHOOL project. YOur efforts are certainly > commendable, but please, please, do not criticise the MoU without > disclosing your interest in it. Lets ask the government to publish the MoU. The issue here is, There has been a lot of effort (mostly volunteer based) to build up the current Free Software infrastructure that is about to finish (the transition from a proprietory infrastructure to a Free Software based one). It took 3 years of considerable effort and active participation from the Free Software community in Kerala. Now when everything is set up in a very commendable way, why is the change brought without the consultation with the community (teachers, students and volunteers)? We have played a part in this and it hurts when some one who claims to be a supporter of the "Knowledge Society" doesn't ask the community when such an important change is made. I'm not against the support for using Red Hat in goverment. The issue is the change brought out without cosultation with the community who had worked hard to bring about such a change. We had a lot of hopes in the IT policy and it is saddening to see the situation worsening and not any better. The previous government (which didn't have a IT policy supporting Free Software) took the decision to move to a completely Free Software based infrastructure because 85% of the teachers supported such a move (and they got such confidence because of the tireless efforts of the community and I'm proud to be a part of such an effort, though a smaller part). http://www.pravi.co.nr/2005/06/08/it-at-school-palakkad-support-group-forma… The issue here is the lack of consultation and transperency. We should know exactly what is in the MoU and what is the reasons for changing a successfully running project. It has been running successfully for the last 3 years. Cheers Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Freeing the Mind : Eben Moglen
by Vimal Joseph 07 Jun '07

07 Jun '07

Audio recording of the talk "Freeing the Mind" by Prof. Eben Moglen @ Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala , 05-06-07 3:00PM http://web.space-kerala.org/freeing.html ~vimal

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Innovativeness in Property Relations
by Sasi Kumar 07 Jun '07

07 Jun '07

Here is a rather sketchy write-up on the seminar on Free Software and Free Culture held at Mascot Hotel at Thiruvananthapuram. The Seminar started at 5:30 and the hall was almost full. Mr. Jyothilal, Secretary of the IT Department, welcomed the gathering. The first talk was by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik on Innovativeness in Property Relations. He spoke very briefly, but demolished the idea that innovation cannot happen without exclusion. He quoted Schumpeter, a great supporter of capitalism, to show that the concept of private property in ideas goes totally against capitalism. Taking the example of two companies, he showed that the best course for each company will always be to innovate. This is true even without the s-called "Intellectual Property Rights". These rights are in addition to the financial benefits they get from innovation. Prof. Eben Moglen spoke next. His talk was called Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture. But he seems to have departed much from what he normally speaks about when he speaks on this topic. He started where Prof. Patnaik left. He said that this was the first time that he has had the government people on his side! His arguments were from the practical point of view which, in a sense, complemented Prof. Patnaik's theoretical analysis. He said that monopoly rights for the innovator is not an essential pre-requisite for innovation to happen. As an example, he pointed to Free Software itself. He said that we have created software that is better than proprietary ones by any technological criteria. And this happened without any monopoly rights for anyone. He said that the company that has accumulated the highest amount of money has innovated very little. Its word processor, he said, was incapable of producing any good-looking document. He narrated an instance where he was asked by an advocate in the US what he used for creating legal documents for submission to courts. When he replied that he used a software called LaTeX, the other advocate wanted to learn LaTeX. Microsoft did not innovate, they purchased. The application called Word was purchased from the Palo Alto Research Centre of Rank Xerox. The company itself came to prominence because IBM did not want their own software to go into the PC they designed and manufactured. He said that it is not possible to delve deeply into justifications for capitalism without encountering contradictions. In his opinion, it was not capitalism that brought wealth to the US, but initiatives that were more socialist than capitalist. Like the free university education given to retired military personnel at public institutes. Another was the high spending in research during to the cold war. He said that steps like these had led to a lot of infrastructure development. Once the cold war ended, and the government started to reduce funding for research, things started changing. Developments in technology, he said, were not cutting at the roots of the structure that crated them. The copyright and patent laws that were supposedly meant to promote innovation were, in fact, slowing them down. Any innovation now involved negotiations with several people who held the rights. Information Technology now makes it possible to make infinite copies of different kinds of software -- programs, music, video, text, and so on -- and this is posing a threat to the companies that were making money from these things. This kind of a situation had been predicted by Marx and Engels, he said, though such technologies could not have been thought of in those days. Prof. Moglen said that all patent laws, including the ones in the US are archaic. A cost-benefit analysis is done on everything the government does. But no such analysis is done to see whether a patent would do more harm than benefit to society before the patent is granted. In other words, innovation is given infinite weightage. The prevention of software patents would give enormous benefits to society, he said. The human species learned to manipulate the world, to control nature for its own benefit. All this happened because of the large brain and hands that were freed when homo sapiens became bipeds. There is the question of which came first. Modern research shows that man became a biped first and it was later that the brain enlarged. Surprisingly Frederick Engels had stated this two centuries ago. He had said that it was the use of hands for manipulating the external world and experimenting with it that led to the increase in brain size. Prof. Moglen said that computer networking had brought about a big change in the way we live. If we switch off the net now, deny the Internet to everyone, a lot of people will find it very difficult to lead a normal life. When a young woman decided to quit myspace, a new community was created to encourage her to come back to the site because she used to be the custodian of all their photographs. The network has changed even the job market. The market is the central point of focus in economics and it decides how resources are allocated under scarcity. You have the demand curve and the supply curve and things like that to determine what shall be the price of a commodity. You have the fixed cost and the marginal cost and things like that. So you sell a loaf of bread for the marginal cost. But suppose there are people who cannot afford to buy the bread at the marginal cost, it leads to injustice. Suppose you have a machine which requires only one loaf of bread to begin with and you can generate thousands of loaves by just pressing a button. Then the marginal cost becomes zero, and it is unfair to charge for each loaf. The network has made possible Free Software, which is frictionless at the network. Here, the fixed cost is covered because human beings love to create. The marginal cost is virtually zero. The economist, homunculus economicus, does not see human nature. The reductionist economist went on reducing until he reduced everything, including himself. This economic dwarfconsiders human beings as individuals. John Donne had said, "No man is." We are not islands. The guy who made Free Software did not do so because he had a monopoly. He did so because he could not have done anything else. This is what makes meaning in, and meaning of, life. People simply enjoy doing things, and one of the best examples for this is Wikipedia. He said that one aspect of Wikipedia is sufficient to demonstrate this -- the breaking news. He said that the breaking news in Wikipedia is better than any other media because people the world over are seeing/hearing news and putting it in Wikipedia. Prof. Moglen said that his blog is often behind Wikipedia when it comes to matters about himself. This is proof of the fact that a proof-of-concept + running code + community leads to production without property. He also mentioned his Correlative Corollary to Faraday's Law. He said that, like in Faraday's Law, take the community, wind the net around it and spin the world, and you get information flowing through the network. We take from people according to their ability and give to people according to their need. There were a few questions related to the topic, which were mostly kind of clarifying his statements. The meeting ended around 8 pm. -- V. Sasi Kumar Free Software Foundation of India Please see: http://swatantryam.blogspot.com/

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'Software ought to be free, free, free' (http://infotech.indiatimes.com/)
by Frederick Noronha [फ्र ेडरिक नोरो न्या] 06 Jun '07

06 Jun '07

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Tech_News/News/Software/Software_ought_to_be… 'Software ought to be free, free, free' IANS[WEDNESDAY, JUNE 06, 2007 01:15:17 PM] 'Software ought to be free, free, free' IANS[ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 06, 2007 01:15:17 PM] NEW DELHI: Eben Moglen, an architect of the GNU General Public License and one of the greatest legal minds in the world of free software, is currently touring India on a mission to promote his message: "anything that is worth copying is worth sharing". Hacker-turned-law-professor Moglen has argued that free software is a fundamental requirement for a free society over-dependent on technical devices. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, served pro bono as general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. He is also the chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. New Delhi-based lawyer Mishi Choudhary has been working to build an India branch of the Software Freedom Law Center. Called the 'legal guardian of the Free Software movement', Moglen now oversees the crafting of the crucial General Public License, version 3. Free software is at the other extreme away from proprietorial software. Legal protection for creating and sharing free software is seen as having become more important at times when dominant market player Microsoft has alleged patent violations by the free software camp. The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. Moglen is the legal brain behind strengthening the GPL and making sure it works. GPL allows users of a free software computer programme the rights for it to be used, studied and modified without restriction, and be copied and redistributed in a way that ensure that further recipients also have these freedoms. Version 3 of the GPL (GPLv3) is being written by Richard Stallman, with legal counsel from Eben Moglen and his Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen was in India last year too, when he revved up activities for a Software Freedom Law Centre in New Delhi. In India this time, Moglen spends two weeks till mid-June, meeting policy makers, lawyers and software professionals. India is itself seen as a fast-rising battleground, where the growing army of software programmers will crucially help decide the software future of the planet, whether it turns proprietorial or "free". Others like free software movement founder Stallman and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have also been making repeated trips to India in recent years. Free software enthusiasts term proprietorial software "unfree" and the political influence of this technology movement is visible from the logo of the Free Software Foundation-India, which has a computer-age CD shaped in the form of a spinning-wheel charkha (the symbol of Indian independence) and a motto which says "weave your own code". Moglen holds a discussion on 'The Death of Proprietary Culture' at Thiruvananthapuram (June 6) and holds an address again on software patents in New Delhi (June 9). On June 11, he moves to Hyderabad, to address the legal fraternity at the Andhra Pradesh High Court and give a talk at the NALSAR University of Law. "One of the purposes of his visit is setting up (of the Software Freedom Law Centre in New Delhi)," said Free Software Foundation-India campaigner Arun M. In Thiruvananthapuram there will also be a symposium on June 6 on "Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Commons" organised by Kerala State Planning Board, Kerala State IT Mission and Free Software Foundation of India, organisers of the event announced. While speaking in New Delhi, during his August 2006 visit, Moglen had remarked: "Anything that is worth copying is worth sharing." He also argued: "The more we give away, the richer we become." He argues that the idea of proprietary software is as ludicrous as having "proprietary mathematics" or "proprietary geometry". This would convert the subjects from "something you can learn" into "something you must buy". Moglen has criticised what he calls the "reification of selfishness". He has said: "A world full of computers which you can't understand, can't fix and can't use (because it is controlled by inaccessible proprietary software) is a world controlled by machines." He also disapproves of trends that result in "excluding people from knowledge", and has called for a "sensible respect for both the creators and users" of the software code. See also: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1117006446&filter=0 -- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST) Skype: fredericknoronha Yahoochat: fredericknoronha http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com Email fred at bytesforall.org Res: 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India

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[Fwd]: gnuschool
by Mahesh T. Pai 06 Jun '07

06 Jun '07

----- Forwarded message from Peter Rios <prios978(a)yahoo.com> ----- > Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 09:20:30 -0700 (PDT) > From: Peter Rios <prios978(a)yahoo.com> > Subject: gnuschool > To: info-gnu(a)gnu.org > Message-ID: <765030.41695.qm(a)web50501.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > > Hi, > > gnuschool is a new program that helps teachers assess students. > It also lets schools keep track of student attendance. > Correcting paper tests/quizzes takes lots of time, which means few assessments. > With gnuschool, teachers can test/quiz students regularly on homework etc. > My students liked seeing the test corrected right away. > gnuschool helps children learn. > I encourage you to assist me with this program. > > gnuschool can be found at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuschool/ and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuschool/ > > Best regards, > Peter Rios > > > > > --------------------------------- > Got a little couch potato? > Check out fun summer activities for kids. > _______________________________________________ > GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org> > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Mahesh T. Pai <<>> http://paivakil.blogspot.com/ It's not the software that's free; it's you.

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Re: cad/cam softwares
by Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray 05 Jun '07

05 Jun '07

> Can anybody recommend some good software in the area of cad/cam? I have > tried qcad but it is not so impressive. Look for BRL-CAD (http://www.brlcad.org/), and Varkon (http://www.tech.oru.se/cad/varkon/). The former is used by the US military, while the latter is used by Saab. Cheers, Debarshi -- GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7 Key server: pgp.mit.edu

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cad/cam softwares
by Kussh Singh 04 Jun '07

04 Jun '07

Can anybody recommend some good software in the area of cad/cam? I have tried qcad but it is not so impressive. Kussh

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Election news....
by Frederick Noronha [फ्र ेडरिक नोरो न्या] 04 Jun '07

04 Jun '07

Very interesting! Look what I ran into: http://www.eci.gov.in/DevForum/DevForum.asp FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) We encourage use of Free/Open Source solutions. Though at ECI and State level, databases are consolidated in Oracle, we encourage smaller databases at the levels of ERO/DEO to be in MySQL, Postgres etc. We are big supporters of OpenOffice.Org. Election Machinery across the country is also encouraged to use freeware like IrfanView for Imaging, GRASS, MapServer, Google Maps API etc. for GIS etc. Our databases are mostly XMLised now, and in this section also, we have released most of the databases in XML format rather than any proprietary format. -- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST) Skype: fredericknoronha Yahoochat: fredericknoronha http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com Email fred at bytesforall.org Res: 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India

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Colloquium on FREE SOFTWARE AND SCIENCE
by Nagarjuna G. 04 Jun '07

04 Jun '07

Colloquium on FREE SOFTWARE AND SCIENCE by Georg Greve, President, Free Software Foundation Europe On Thursday June 7, 2007 at 3:30 pm Venue: V G Kulkarni Auditorium, HBCSE ABOUT THE TALK FREE SOFTWARE AND SCIENCE Free Software and science share common roots, and benefit society in several similar ways. In his talk, Mr Greve will explain the concept of Free Software and how it relates to maintaining our scientific basis as a society. As a practical example of this collaboration, the talk will give a brief introduction of the Science, Education and Learning in Freedom project, in which the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research plays a crucial role. The talk will close with an overview of how all of this relates to the global political trends of knowledge monopolisation, and the Access to Knowledge initiative. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Georg C.F. Greve President, Free Software Foundation Europe In early 2001, Georg Greve initiated the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE, FSF Europe), the first Free Software Foundation outside the United States of America and the largest transnational Free Software Foundation so far. Construction and coordination of FSFE as European non-governmental organisation, as well as its integration and coordination in global context was the focus of his work in the past years. Georg writes in the "Brave GNU World," a monthly column on free software published on the Internet in as many as 10 languages, and in international magazines including the German Linux-Magazin. The range of Georg's activities spanned areas like technology, politics, society, and economy as well as classical management. Among other things, Georg Greve was invited as an expert to the "Commission on Intellectual Property Rights" of the UK government or represented the coordination circle of German Civil Society during the first phase of the United Nations (UN) World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as part of the German governmental delegation; he also furthered networking the Civil Society working groups on European level as well as for the thematic working group on Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks (PCT) and Free Software. All are welcome. How to reach the venue and contact details are available from: http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/Data/ObjectType/c/contact/viewObjectType Nagarjuna G. -- Nagarjuna G. http://www.gnowledge.org/ http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/Data/Objects/n/nagarjun/viewObject

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Fsf-friends June 2007