Fsf-friends July 2020

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

2 participants
17 discussions

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

While respondents cited OSS's 'low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)' as one of the best reasons to support OSS, an 'alternative to Microsoft' did not lag far behind. A plurality (40%) of all respondents felt that a low TCO was the best reason to support OSS. One-third of all respondents cited 'an alternative to Microsoft' as one of the best reasons to support OSS.</quote> The url is http://opensource.org/halloween/halloween7.php raj

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

The term free software isn't mentioned once, not even as an exploitable weakness. This contrasts strongly with the original Halloween Memoranda. I'm not sure what this means, but one strong possibility is that the term has simply fallen out of use both at Microsoft and in their survey population. The messages and tactics the open-source community has developed over the last five years are working well. Our memes about security, TCO, and competitive impact have achieved deep penetration in Microsoft's survey population. Abstract arguments about intellectual property rights, on the other hand, have served Microsoft just as poorly as they have served us.

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

Beyond Market, Freedom Matters BY K G KUMAR What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision, asks K.G. Kumar in an article that was earlier published in the Economic and Political Weekly of India. By basing itself on moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness, the Free Software Movement seeks to focus on the importance of "freedom" as in "free speech" or "free elections", and not gratis, as in "free beer". In the process, it has invited the wrath of the likes of Microsoft. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft? A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works. --- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and No. 2 in the company, responding to a question by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Newbart We could not establish a community of freedom in the land of proprietary software where each program had its lord. We had to build a new land in cyberspace -- the free software GNU operating system, which we started writing in 1984. In 1991, when GNU Most read story was almost finished, the kernel Linux written by Linus Torvalds filled the last in Linux: gap; soon the free GNU/Linux system was available. -- Richard Matthew Stallman, Founder and President, Free Software Foundation --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ENTHUSIASTS GIVE IT A BOOST It is easy -- and tempting -- to pitch these two opposing positions against each other, and portray the whole "free" vs proprietary software debate in antagonistic, David vs Goliath terms. It is even more tempting and dramatic to view these differences as the contours of a battle between lowly, poorly paid and equipped programmers and the world's largest software company, Microsoft, led by what the international media incessantly reminds us is the world's richest man. In reality, though, the Free Software Movement is not a movement against Microsoft or Bill Gates. Nor does it appear daunted by the gigantic proportions or reputations of its foes. That is because the well-spring of its raison d'etre is moral rectitude and ethical resoluteness. The Free Software Movement is a movement for freedom, pure and simple--freedom as defined in any combination of these dictionary meanings: "exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment"; "the quality of self-determination attributed to the will"; "the state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint"; "liberty of action"; "exemption from arbitrary, despotic or autocratic control"; "unfettered"; even, "independence" and "civil liberty". That last sense is particularly apt, since Richard Matthew Stallman began the Free Software Movement in 1984 inspired by the ideals of the American War of Independence of 1776: "freedom, community and voluntary co-operation, which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software." Yet, critics and opponents of the Free Software Movement choose to ignore these allusions of the word "freedom", choosing to focus, instead, on the economic and business aspects of "free" software. The mighty multinational Microsoft, for instance, alleges that the very notion of free software is "unAmerican". In an address at New York University on 3 May 2001, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's senior vice president, described the movement as "flimsy", "flawed", jeopardizing property rights and threatening to undermine the software industry, a key economic growth engine. Reuters reported that Mundie's language was "more in the spirit of a trash-talking sports star than the typically ambiguous, jargon-filled phrasings of a software executive." What is it about the Free Software Movement that raises the hackles of the world's most powerful software company? And what is it that causes Microsoft executives to misconstrue the essence of the movement, and often misattribute it to the Open Source initiative--a related, but philosophically watered-down version of the same original vision? Any answers to these and related questions must inevitably point to a bearded, long-haired, pun-loving genius of a programmer named Richard Matthew ("Math You", as he once elaborated to an interviewer, referring to his abiding love for mathematics) Stallman. Born in New York in 1953, Stallman--or RMS as he is popularly known in the fraternity, after his login identity name for the computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he started his programming career--is the only child of a printing press owning father and a liberal-minded schoolteacher of a mother. Growing up in New York's West Side, Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. In 1971, during the end of his freshman year, he got a job as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. (Contrary to popular belief, reinforced by media reports of virus attacks and their creators, a "hacker" is not a malevolent, evil-minded person tapping away at the keyboard of a computer to break into distant security systems. Rather, a hacker is merely someone who is obsessed with programming and writing code, someone who would rather program than, say, eat or sleep, someone who has imbibed the spirit of "playful cleverness". The more malicious type portrayed in the media is more correctly referred to as a "cracker".) At MIT's AI Lab, Stallman learned operating system development by doing it as part of a long-standing software-sharing community. "Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking," he notes. Stallman wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975, for which, in 1991, he received the Grace Hooper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. ("Calling Emacs an editor is like calling the Earth a nice hunk of dirt," is what one commentator had to say about this powerful, comprehensive Swiss Army knife-style piece of software.) However, the AI Lab's hacker community and spirit soon collapsed, when corporate interests began luring away all the talented hackers from MIT. For Stallman, the last straw was when the AI Lab decided to use Digital's non-free timesharing system, alongside the fact that the computers then used, like the VAX or the 68020, featured operating systems that required signing a non-disclosure agreement even to get an executable copy. Stallman found himself confronted with a stark moral choice. He had to choose to do something "for the good...so as to make a community possible again." That was how he homed in on the idea of developing an operating system (OS), the heart of any computer, without which no one can run one. In January 1984, Stallman resigned from MIT to start the GNU Project to develop the free operating system, GNU. GNU is a recursive acronymn (hackers revel in puns and word play) for "GNU's Not Unix". Stallman quit MIT so that the institute would not be able to interfere with the distribution of GNU as free software. GNU is Unix-compatible software, i.e, it can run Unix programs but is not identical to Unix, then the leading enterprise OS, known for its portability. In 1985, the year after he quit MIT, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in Boston,dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs. (Those who imagine that the Free Software Movement arose in response to Microsoft should remember that the Redmont company's breakthrough OS, Windows 3.1, shipped in June 1992, a full seven years after FSF was founded, while its current flagship, Windows 2000, came almost another six years after that.) FSF is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds by selling GNU CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of which users are free to copy and change), as well as from donations. FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in "free speech", not necessarily gratis, as in "free beer") software and free documentation. In particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds. It is estimated that there are over 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems today. These systems are often mistakenly called just "Linux"; calling them "GNU/Linux" corrects this confusion. They may not know it, but most Indian Internet users are already benefiting from free software, because today, almost all Web servers run on free software or variants of GNU/Linux. Even The Economist -- a magazine that supports free enterprise and corporate energy -- admits that on the server side, GNU/Linux has become so impressive and capable that it now represents a real threat to the Microsoft Windows NT hegemony. According to The Economist, over one million websites now run on GNU/Linux. Many ISPs now base their Internet operations on GNU/Linux, in preference to Windows NT or even Unix. Users in some niche segments like advanced graphics and image processing, swear by GNU/Linux's robustness and reliability. In fact, many of the effects for the film Titanic were created on GNU/Linux machines. "Using 200 DEC Alpha-based systems running the Red Hat 4.1 distribution of GNU/Linux, after upgrading the kernel to support the PC164 mainboard, Digital Domain found a performance increase of three to four over SGI systems. The combination of the GNU/Linux OS and Alpha CPUs also delivered the most cost-effective solution to time and processing demands," according to Daryll Strauss of Digital Domain, the company that developed graphics for Titanic. GNU/Linux is now a robust operating system, complete with an entire set of tools, utilities and applications, almost all of which are distributed with source code, and free of cost. It is not just the near-zero cost of this particular OS that wins the hearts of network administrators; it is its greater stability. This matters a great deal for remote-managed network servers. Consider, also, these facts: * gcc, the GNU C compiler, the flagship of the GNU suite, has consistently outperformed the best of commercial compilers. (A compiler is a program that translates a source program into an executable program, or that translates instructions written in a high-level programming language into machine language.) * GNU/Linux has over 20 million users around the world, on eight processor families. * Apache, the free Web server from Apache Software Foundation, has 61% of the global market share for Web servers (figures for May 2000), putting it streets ahead of commercial products like Microsoft's IIS (21%) and Netscape's Enterprise Server (5%). * BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon), an open source program, runs over 80% of the domain name servers around the world. * SendMail, the mailer programme used by nearly 80% of the world's installations, is free software. * Perl, TCL and Python are the public-domain languages that stitch together thousands of websites. * StarOffice, a complete office applications suite programmed in Java, which can be a total substitute for Microsoft's Office, has been released under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) by Sun Microsystems. * AbiWord (www.abisource.com), a small (3.6 MB) open source GPL'd word processor offers everything that MS Word does --- for free! In media-related areas, free software has made impressive strides, especially in the post-PC, post-Microsoft, post-Intel, post-Internet Explorer architecture, as these examples prove: 1. TiVo uses GNU/Linux for its digital TV recorder. 2. GNU/Linux forms the basis for Kerbango Radio and PenguinRadio, two Internet appliances that allow users to tune in to audio streams from around the world. 3. ScreenPhone, a new cordless communications device from Sweden's Ericsson, uses Red Hat Linux, with a graphical interface from Trolltech displayed on a colour touch screen, to offer telephony, email and Web browsing. Ericsson says this is the first of a new range of consumer products and services for home communications that it aims to develop jointly with Red Hat, one of the leading companies that distribute GNU/Linux. 4. LiViD, the Linux Video and DVD project, circumvents the Content Scramble System (CSS) used to block unauthorized viewing of DVDs. While the US film industry sees this as a ploy by hackers to subvert the encryption system, hackers say they just want the freedom to see their favourite DVDs under GNU/Linux (which was not an industry-supported platform). 5. Since 1994, the New York-based Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has used a GNU/Linux-based approach to provide approximately 45 nations with some of their earliest connections to the Internet. 6. In Ethiopia, which was too small a market for the likes of Microsoft, the free software typesetting programme TeX has been used to develop good fonts in Amharic, the main national language. 7. The "Scholar Net" programme of Mexico hopes to use GNU/Linux to bring computers and the Net to every elementary and mid-level school in the country. 8. Back home, the Simputer project, born in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, uses free software (mainly, GNU/Linux, Perl and Tk) to bring a simple, mobile computer into the hands of the average villager. 9. And finally, interestingly enough, the principles of free software have created what has come to be called "open journalism". The best example is Slashdot.org (slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."), run on free software, and whose content is generated by readers submitting news and stories, whetted and selected by a panel (named with each submission)--an example of a sturdy distributed news gathering and filtering machine independent of the large mainstream media companies. As these examples and instances reveal, free software can -- and has -- worked well in the real, rough-and-tumble world of business and commerce. This is simply because the term "free software" has nothing to do with price; it is about freedom. In Stallman's words, a program is free software if: * You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. * You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.) * You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. * You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Free software is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) or other licences approved by FSF in all domains. The GNU GPL gives each user the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software, based on unfettered access to the source code. Being free to do this means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission. While granting the user these freedoms, the GNU GPL defends them by saying that no one is allowed to take them away from anyone else. Any published program, which incorporates all or a substantial part of a GNU GPL-covered program, must itself be released under the GNU GPL. The GNU GPL ensures that no person or community can privatize the community's free software. In Stallman's words, "Whoever wishes to copy parts of our software into his program must let us use parts of that program in our programs. Nobody is forced to join our club, but those who wish to participate must offer us the same co-operation they receive from us. This makes the system fair." "Copyleft" is the method used by FSF to prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free. The central idea of copyleft is that FSF gives everyone permission to run the program, copy it, modify it, and distribute modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights. Later, Stallman would say that the decision to start the GNU project was based on a spirit similar to these words, attributed to Hillel, the rabbi scholar who flourished in the time of Herod : "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?". "As an atheist," Stallman hastens to add, "I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said." Stallman went on to become the principal author of the GNU C compiler (gcc), a portable optimizing compiler that was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and seven programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GSD), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship, and, in 1996, an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998, along with Linus Torvalds, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award. In 1999, he received the Yuri Rubinski memorial award. On a personal note, RMS likes music, butterflies, caves, good food and, needless to add, computers. He sometimes writes jokes, funny poetry and song parodies. When in the mood, especially in an evangelical, proselytizing setting before an enraptured audience, he playfully refers to himself as "St. IGNUcius in the Church of Emacs" -- even going so far as to don ethereal robes and a halo of a hat!. In the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary", this is how he described himself: I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago, I split up with the PDP-10 computer to which I was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment, I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "RMS". Not everyone, though, could get along famously with Stallman's purist and uncompromising approach. In 1988, some of them rallied around another celebrated hacker, Eric Raymond, to start the Open Source movement, supposedly a more pragmatic, less dogmatic, apolitical initiative to focus on the business and commercial aspects of free software. Erroneous media coverage has given the impression that Richard Stallman's work was done by the Open Source movement. The fact is, that latter movement was started only in 1998, while Stallman began the project to develop the alternative free operating system GNU in January 1984, almost two years before the Free Software Foundation was founded. In Stallman's own words, "These two movements are like two political parties in our community. Labeling me or the GNU Project with the term 'open source' is like labeling Jawaharlal Nehru as a member of the BJP." Stallman elaborates the fundamental difference between the two initiatives: "Some who favoured this term ('open source') aimed to avoid the confusion of 'free' with 'gratis' -- a valid goal. Others, however, aimed to set aside the spirit of principle that had motivated the free software movement and the GNU project, and to appeal instead to executives and business users, many of whom hold an ideology that places profit above freedom, above community, above principle. Thus, the rhetoric of 'Open Source' focuses on the potential to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community, and principle." 'Free software' and 'Open Source' describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. The GNU Project continues to use the term 'free software', to express the idea that freedom, not just technology, is important." The main argument for the term 'open source software' is that 'free software' makes some people uneasy, says Stallman. "That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things." Which is all that he did during his recent trip to India to launch the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF India) in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly, Trivandrum) on 20 August at the Freedom First! conference. FSF India has been functioning informally as a close-knit group of programmers and free software users for some time. Though many of the core members of the group are based in Thiruvananthapuram, the network is fairly widespread, and encompasses programmers, students, IT professionals and lay persons from all over the subcontinent. Some of them have been running commercially successful businesses on free software. For instance, an Indo-UK publishing venture, Focal Image, has, for the last two years, been doing very good business out of Thiruvananthapuram, publishing scientific works using entirely free software solutions, including the LaTeX document preparation system. Stallman was made a State government guest for the duration of his five-day tour of Kerala. The day he arrived in Thiruvananthapuram, he met the Minister for Industries and Information Technology, P. K. Kunhalikutty. (Stallman was earlier scheduled to meet the Chief Minister, A. K. Antony, who, being indisposed, had to cancel his appointment.) An official press release from the minister's office said that "Mr. Kunhalikutty informed Mr. Stallman that the government was happy that a movement that represented the most discerning, yet increasingly mainstream ethos amongst the software development community is taking roots in Kerala. The free software movement, in his view, represented the distinctly open approach that the State wishes to adopt for IT-driven industrial growth and societal transformation..." The release added that "the government is also keen to understand how well free software can be leveraged in the context of e-governance, particularly at the local self-government level. More specifically, Mr Kunhalikutty requested the involvement of Mr Stallman and the Free Software Foundation in developing free courseware (along the lines of free software) for the education of young students in the colleges and those in need in the IT industry in the State." Stallman himself pointed out that free software has a special relevance for the Indian educational sector. "Schools in India can benefit by redistributing free software to save on licence fees. But free software offers a deeper benefit for education: the knowledge in free software is public knowledge, not secret. The sealed black box of a proprietary software system is designed to keep people in the dark. With free software, students can study the software they use, to learn how it works. They can write improvements to the software, and thus learn the craft of software development--which usually consists of improving existing programs." "Computer users in India, as elsewhere, deserve the freedom to share and change software, the way cooks share and change recipes," Stallman said. "So I am delighted to inaugurate the Free Software Foundation of India, which will promote the use and the development of free software in this country. At first, FSF India will help individuals, communities, schools, governments and enterprises in India to make use of the free software that the rest of the world has already developed. Over time, FSF India will lead Indian programmers to contribute to the human knowledge that free software represents." "It is natural for human beings to share ideas," Stallman added, "and by doing so, we make the whole world richer. When our contributions can be seen, used, enjoyed, and built on by others around the world, as they can in the free software community, it gives us a sense of community that is motivating and liberating." According to its official spokespersons, FSF India, which is the first sister organization of FSF in Asia, will strive to ensure that free software is strengthened in all respects so as to form a genuine, credible and viable alternative to proprietary software for every kind of application. To do so, FSF India aims to : 1. promote awareness about free software among the general public and, specifically, among programmers and students; 2. increase access to free software by users in India; 3. promote the development of local solutions to local problems by empowering local programmers in the use of free platforms, tools and technologies; 4. provide or support free software by way of documentation, expert help or any other means; 5. help organize training for programmers and users of free software platforms and software; 6. carry out R&D work for free software solutions to suit local requirements; 7. provide services for the free software programmer community by, for example, locating and distributing jobs; 8. assist the national and State governments in all aspects relating to free software, such as evolving and maintaining standards; providing a quality assurance mechanism for free software; and ensuring the use of free software in government and quasi-government milieux; and 9. provide services such as adjudication and conflict redressal within the free software domain. To be sure, however, FSF India will not find the road ahead free of daunting obstacles. Already, certain corporate interests have taken objection to Stallman being feted as an official State guest of the government of Kerala. And the West Bengal government's recent announcement of a tie-up with Microsoft for its e-governance infrastructure is just an indication of the shape of things (read battles) to come. Stallman, however, remains unfazed. "More important than convenience and reliability is freedom -- the freedom to co-operate. What I'm concerned about is not individual people or companies so much as the kind of way of life that we have. That's why I think it's a distraction to think about fighting Microsoft," Stallman told a Salon writer. Stallman believes that Microsoft has another, more specific purpose in attacking the GNU General Public Licence. "Microsoft is known generally for imitation rather than innovation," he explains. "When Microsoft does something new, its purpose is strategic--not to improve computing for its users, but to close off alternatives for them." "Microsoft uses an anticompetitive strategy called 'embrace and extend'. This means they start with the technology others are using, add a minor wrinkle which is secret so that nobody else can imitate it, then use that secret wrinkle so that only Microsoft software can communicate with other Microsoft software. In some cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program when others you work with use a Microsoft program. In other cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program for job A if you use a Microsoft program for job B. Either way, 'embrace and extend' magnifies the effect of Microsoft's market power." What does society need? Stallman's answer: "It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change." "Society also needs freedom," he adds. "When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives. And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary co-operation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbours in a natural way is "piracy", they pollute our society's civic spirit. This is why we say that free software is a matter of freedom, not price". Anyone who talks so fervently about freedom, community and civic spirit must surely be a rabble-rousing, fist-shaking, table-thumping commie -- that's the general drift of corporate America's assessment of Stallman. "For the record", he clarifies, "I am not a communist or anything similar. The idea that people ought to co-operate and help their neighbours is much older than Marx--in fact, one notable exponent of this view lived 2000 years ago. And the idea of inalienable rights embodied in the GNU GPL comes from the founders of the United States. People who disagree with me often find it convenient to call me a communist, but they do so in order to misrepresent my views." Which are precise and unambiguous: "You deserve to be able to co-operate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks. You deserve free software. " Even Stallman's most bitter critics readily acknowledge the debt that all of them owe him one way or another. Most of them say, "If Richard did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him." The same sentiment must have been in the mind of journalist and noted GNU/Linux watcher Glyn Moody when he wrote about "...dedicated hackers as Richard Stallman and the FSF who do not code to live, but live to code. This, ultimately, is the reason free software does not depend on open source companies for its own survival: It exists beyond the market." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ References: * Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. London. 2001. * Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin Books. Harmondsworth. 2001. * DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone (ed.). OpenSources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates. California. 1999. * http://www.gnu.org * http: //www.stallman.org * http: //www.fsf.org.in

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- dear all, BusinessWorld magazine India, just gave me my life's greatest Diwali gift: a cover story, with an expressive, black-suit and bowtie clad billgates, eyeing an aggressive-looking Tux, with the headline: "BILL to bill: Why India is a Critical Battleground in the War between Microsoft and Linux." good amount of research done by Charles Assisi and Shelley Singh. though i wish the article could have been far more comprehensive, with more box stories, larger editorial coverage, etc. the story does mention indian localizing efforts, and several india-centric initiatives. i dunno about you guyz, but am going out to buy about a dozen copies of the Rs 5 per copy mag, and am gonna hand-deliver to key personnel in my key contact lists. happy diwali to all. May the Linux Lamp of Freedom Burn Brightly in Your Lives This Year, Bringing you Prosperity, Wealth, and Lots of Happiness. LL

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

Mahiti looking for office administrator, graphic designer! Mahiti, a technology company committed to helping the voluntary sector harness the benefits of technology announces an opening for an office accountant/administrator. Women with a background in accounting practice and at least six months in work experience will be considered. Mahiti is also looking for a graphic designer with or without experience

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

fred at bytesforall dot org It must be quite flattering when a government sits up, takes note of the potential of a Linux-users group, and prominently features it in advertisements noticed nationwide. This happened recently in Pakistan, where a small but growing band of GNU/Linux enthusiasts -- and some senior policy planners working at another level -- have understood impact that this alternative computing operating system could have for their plans. Sometime in June, the English-language newspaper 'The Dawn' published from the port city of Karachi, announced: "... The Government of Pakistan is committing itself to the reduction of piracy and the protection of intellectual property. Linux and open source technologies are the corner stone of this initiative." Deploying GNU/Linux to avoid piracy might be unexpected logic. But in the sub-continent of South Asia -- covering the populous regions of India, Pakistan and smaller neighbours -- per capita income hovers around US$300 a year. Affordability of software prices is a key issue, and faced by repeated charges of 'piracy' of costly proprietorial software, some are beginning to see GNU/Linux as an option. (This is perhaps one reason why the many forms of 'freedom' offered by GNU/Linux is also sometimes interpreted in terms of the 'price freedom' and affordability it offers users here, though this may not be seen as too important an issue in the more-affluent world.) Pakistan's Technology Resource Mobilization Unit (www.tremu.gov.pk) has been established by the Government of Pakistan to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors. One is to focus on GNU/Linux. "These physical and virtual groups involve volunteers in Pakistan and abroad, who contribute to policy making by the Government of Pakistan. Each group has national and regional coordinators. Meetings, seminars and conferences are held to debate, crystallize and propagate relevant ideas, concepts and policy directions," the Pakistani government announced recently. On the GNU/Linux front, "the task force is expected to include committed professionals (e.g.PLUC), academics, and practicing software developers to set the future direction for Pakistan", it was officially announced via the Pakistani press. PLUC is the Pakistan Linux Users' Community. PLUC was formed in December 1999 by Abdul Basit <basit(a)basit.cc>, PLUC's current moderator. Initially, there were just eight members in the group. In a couple of months, the PLUC list increased to 30. By 2001, there were 100+. Now there are over 170 members subscribed to the PLUC mailing list, and some three hundred registered at http://www.linuxpakistan.net Basit and his friends launched this network from the Sir Syed University (SSUET) in Karachi. It is codenamed Linuxpakistan. Plans are to have a "Linux force" -- as it has been described -- to hold meetings, seminars and conferences to educate the user community. "They will also come with proposals to the government (for) funding such as the creation of user-friendly client/server software, training strategies, local language software development, the induction of LINUX into (the) basic syllabi, etc," says the government in an advert published in The Dawn newspaper of Karachi. TReMU, Pakistan's Technology Resource Mobilization Unit, has plans to set up secure network and e-commerce task forces too, in addition to the GNU/Linux task force. "The main qualifications to participate are a commitment to volunteer your time and intellectual inputs, to work in a team, and to have a desire for the betterment of the country," says TReMU, making an appeal to the patriotism of the GNU/Linux techies. It anticipates that these groups will "enable a sharing of resources and ideas". Besides, TReMU hopes that several of the ideas could germinate into development projects and thus "translate the brainstorming, discussion and planning sessions into practical realities". Those interested in participating have been asked to fill out the relevant forms on the TReMU website, at www.gov.tremu.pk. It's clear that some influential decision-makers and policy advisors are keen to push towards a GNU/Linux direction. At worst, this would help Third World countries like Pakistan to battle frequent charges of having "pirated" proprietorial software -- most of which is atrociously priced from a developing country perspective. At best, this could help Pakistan, which like neighbouring India has a long reputation for its software skills, with building up skills which encourages its young programmers to understand better and go further in, given the transparent and collaborative nature of the GNU/Linux software. Ovais Khan <ovaiskhan80(a)yahoo.com> wrote in to PLUC recently: "There was an ad on Page 21 of The Dawn about the creation of a task force for Linux, secure networks and e-commerce. The interesting thing is that the name of PLUC is in the ad. Congrats (PLUC's key driving force Abdul) Basit <basic(a)basit.cc> and all the others." But some felt differently. Fawad Halim <fawad(a)fawad.net> commented: "I'm very skeptical about anything (good) coming from the Government, but let's see what comes out of this." Bilal Muddassir shot back: "I think the only organization that can mobilize immense amounts of resources (of course if it wants to) for a particular purpose currently in Pakistan is a government organization. Being skeptical is okay..." Pakistan Ministry of Science and Technology advisor Salman Ansari <salman(a)super.net.pk> recently told this correspondent that he sees other uses for GNU/Linux deployment. For instance, some 50,000 low cost computers are to be installed in schools and colleges all over Pakistan. These will be PII computers, each being sourced for less than $100 a piece, he says. Proprietary software for these PCs would cost a small fortune. Surely more than what the computers cost! But, using GNU/Linux as the OS would ensure that the overall prices are kept low. Pakistan is seriously considering the use of Star Office, an Open Source productivity tool that does the same work as proprietary software costing thousands of rupees. "Don't be surprised if we become the first country in the world to say that all (government-run) services are going to be GNU/Linux based," says an enthusiastic Ansari. It's to be seen if these dreams can be accomplished. "I've set up several networks. When I started setting them up six years ago, the only thing I could run them with, without breaking the law, was Linux. At that time, Windows NT was very flaky. So I've developed a very healthy respect for Linux and Open Source," says Ansari. Half-sarcastically, he adds with a smile: "Though I'm a typical Pakistani, I still feel a bit uncomfortable in buying pirated software, and paying 90 cents for a software priced US$500." Ansari says Pakistan has been speaking to some big vendors of proprietorial prices. "We told them we would like to do business with them, but for that the pricing would have to be realistic first," says he. If current software prices are taken into account, to go 'legal' Pakistan would have to pay something like US$400 for converting each of its PCs to proprietorial software. "The Business Software Alliance (the network promoting and protecting the interests of proprietorial software) has been going all out for it. But they have to come in at a price which equates to the economics of the country," argues Ansari. Ansari points to the belief which says that if professionals want to enter the software development field need to get into Open Source. "You will be then able to create products, and not just projects," says he. It makes sense in terms of regional language solutions front too. "Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) language software is easier (to use) if it resides at the OS level," he adds. Ansari says that as chairman of the peer review committee of all IT projects, he has been keen to turn down any project that uses pirated software. "But what this (asking for non-pirated software) ends up doing is that it bloats the cost of the software," he complains, suggesting the Open Source could be a way out. Says he: "There are two interesting initiatives now. We're launching a major e-governance programme, and the government must have legal software. We're also planning to put in computers in rural schools. Both are going to be high profile projects. We want to make sure they don't use pirated software, even while we work on cleaning out other PCs..." Ansari says this has 'thrown open the debate' in Pakistan. One instance is that the Technology Resource Mobilization Unit has a task force on Linux. The government has also agreed to put in Rs 200 million to fund R&D and software product development, which the government would then own and distribute for free -- cutting into the very logic of proprietorial software. On the client-side, efforts are on to build a GUI interface for Linux, by working at the OS level for projects which relate to text-to-speech, language translation and language-related software. "But at the same time, we're not stopping anyone (in government) from buying branded products. So long as they can justify it and negotiate a good price (the justification for which has to be very valid)," says the US-returned engineer. "In a government contract, if you're going to bid for computers which has a legal OS and office suite, guess who's going to win," he says. Three aspects take priority on this front, says Ansari. Firstly, encouraging legal software. Secondly, enabling a 'complete industry growth' for product development based on Linux. And, thirdly, making people "very, very aware" of this powerful tool. GNU/Linux is something which "almost everybody has adopted, whether it's Sun, Oracle or IBM". This would reduce the cost of computing for the people, even while we would like to use non-pirated software, says Ansari. He finds it ludicrous to believe the BSA's estimation that India uses 63% pirated software, while Pakistan's figure is something like 83%. "Their current paradigm is simply to count the number of computers shipped, and multiply this by five, on the assumption that each computer needs five pieces of software. This is a ludicrous way of estimating things," says he. Says he: "Sure, piracy is far high. If everybody somehow started using Linux, we'd fall below the US piracy levels, and maybe have 2% piracy. We want to be ahead of these guys before they start their next 'war on terrorism' (using the issue of 'intellectual property')." Ansari also argues that Pakistan wants the likes of Microsoft to come out with prices that are reasonable. "We want companies like those to also come and invest in the country, where software or drivers could be written here," he argues. Youngsters -- smitten by the power of GNU/Linux -- sing its praises too. Says Zuhair Ali <zuhair_ali(a)yahoo.com> who works in networking and has done his Masters in Physics and Systems Engineering: "I'm interested in Linux because of the fact that in Linux you know what's going on. Nothing is hidden from you behind nice dialog boxes as in Windows. It's a very good toy for me as I can play and tweak as much as I want and I have all the necessary help and information from the Net." Ali informs that earlier this year, he and his friends started a chapter of the PLUC in the national capital of Islamabad. It started small, with just four members. Twenty-two year old Zeeshan Ashraf of Karachi, CTO at the Pakistan-based Specific Research Laboratories <zee_shan56(a)yahoo.com>, says that PLUC colleague Basit has developed a distro called 'PK-Linux'. Ashraf himself is working on developing a distro for the embedded and industrial market "much of the likes of what IBM and Cisco did for their forthcoming hardware". Ashraf is also designing an 'industrial PC' and is "in the process of making a distro for real-time Linux that would go with this PC and and would have all the drivers to support the custom hardware that we ship with this PC". Other Linux enthusiasts however drop hints that it won't be easy convincing all the many decision-makers and government officials to go along with a pro-Linux policy. "The LINUX community is very large, but it needs to be assembled together. PLUC is doing this effort towards bringing all the LINUX user base on a group, so all and everybody can benefit from the experiences of the others, and get their queries answered," says Ashraf. Meetings are held regularly every month, and now PLUC has now undertaken an initiative of spreading the community further by approaching Universities and delivering seminars or conducting workshops, ad educating the students of the endless possibilities of GNU/Linux. But much needs to be done. For one, the potential of GNU/Linux in countries like Pakistan is not fully appreciated globally. Partly, it's a problem with poor communication. Argues Ashraf: "There's mostly no development being done in Pakistan on the OS level. And, even if there are a few people who are doing this, they (don't publicize it). So, since the national community does not know of this endeavour, how can we expect the international market to appreciate this?" He himself has been working to develop a hardware card which will provide the most common network busses for the Industrial developer. Ashraf plans to incorporate all the drivers and APIs for this in the Linux kernel, most probably in the PK-Linux distro too. Zeeshan 'Shan' Ashraf is the IT manager of a pharma company. Says he: "Linux has a lot of potential, and features that can be excellent for Third World (developing) countries like Pakistan. It's free (affordable) and has almost all the same software and hardware-base as does Windows or any other OS for that matter. Pakistan, specially the government-maintained organisations, schools, colleges, hospitals and other institutions can benefit from deploying Linux (as it would provide affordable solutions) and also make it possible to utilise old legacy systems. This would cut costs." ENDS

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by None 25 Jul '20

25 Jul '20

On 23 Jun 2002, Gaurav Priyolkar wrote: > Hi Fred, > > Thanks for the continuing encouragement and support. > > The url where our project is available is: > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/glibs > > Could you please post it to the fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in list for > anyone who might be interested, both in using it and helping build it > further. > > Thanks. > > Regards, > Gaurav > > On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 10:56, Frederick Noronha wrote: > > Below is something I had written some time back. Unfortunately, like many > > good projects, the young men involved seem to have got busy with their > > working lives, after finishing college. > > > > Perhaps it would help if, after putting in so much work, such initiatives > > could be taken up in the spirit of free-software/open-source. Unless > > efforts are made to involve bigger teams of people... it won't happen. FN > > > > On Sat, 22 Jun 2002 fsf-friends-request(a)mm.gnu.org.in wrote: > > > > > From: "r_sreekumar " <r_sreekumar(a)rediffmail.com> > > > hello > > > we are looking for a library software (GPL) for my college > > > library. plese inform if anybody have any information. > > > sreekumar

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