New subject: Conducting a GNU/Linux Workshop at KMC College, Khopoli

20 Feb 2003


      I recently had the opportunity to be at GNUnify - a Free software
festival.  The guest of honour was the GNU man himself - RMS.  I was
present on Sunday the 16th February where most of the invited talks were 
held.
There have been other reports on GNUnify, so I'll concentrate only on the 
Mumbai GLUG's contribution.  Names may have been changed, no disrespect is 
meant by this.
The day started out with Dr. Nagnurjuna telling us why we should use Free 
Software, and dispelling some of the myths that have been spread by 
persons with other agendas.  His contention that changing from our current 
operating system to GNU is no different from the changes that we have to 
make every two years to start using a new version of that OS is sound.
Nagarjuna tends to flavour his lectures with a lot of humour and it was 
quite engaging that day.  Especially funny was his comment about changing 
word processors: "We changed from WordStar to another word processor 
called Word Perfect, and then to another word processor called Word, and 
then to another word processor called Word, and then to another word 
processor called Word...".  I overheard RMS commend him on this point too.
Nag also had a three stage IQ test during his presentation.  In the first
case he asked the audience if they knew who was responsible for certain
inventions/discoveries in science.  He next asked people if they knew who
had written certain Free Software projects (linux, emacs, gcc, perl,
python), and finally who had written certain Proprietary products.  
Everyone got the first two correct.
Later in the day Prof. Jeetendra Shah - or should we call him Freetendra
Shahftware? - delivered a talk on the use of Free Software in education.  
He spoke primarily about research done by Seymour Papert in the use of
computers to enable education.  This is different from using computers to
teach children.  While the latter uses the computer to program children, 
the former lets the children learn by programming a computer.
The talk was particularly interesting for me because it deals with my 
area of research.
He spoke about how Free Software could help us achieve this goal, 
primarily by building different scenarios for people from different 
backgrounds.
He also demonstrated Freeduc and distributed 25 CDs of the same.  He 
suggests that every school should have one of these CDs.
Jeetendra Shah was quite active throughout the day urging people to come 
forward and support other projects too, like IndLinux.
The final attraction was RMS' speech.  Nagarjuna introduced him, although 
it sounded more like he was reading out his own death warrant.  He said 
RMS was not a person, and then followed it up by saying he's history.  At 
that point RMS was ready to strangle Nag, if it weren't for the large 
number of people watching.
There were several Mumbai Gluggers in Pune over the weekend.  I'm told 
Nirav gave a lecture on PHP on Saturday.  I wasn't present for that.
I also met Gurpreet Singh - who's been on the receiving end of my list
policing on more than one occassion.  He made some insightful comments
during Prof. Shah's presentation.  He's requested me to post the usenet
etiquette here, so I'm going to do it for the last time ever.  It's now up
to younger chaps to take the initiative.
http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20021125/007711.htm...
which refers to: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
I'd also post a link to Eric Raymond's article on tuxedo.org, but can 
anyone get to tuxedo.org today?  Well, if anyone can, it's at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Oh, yeah, the list search engine is at 
http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/search/linuxers
Philip
-- 
When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him
keep her.
    	-- Sacha Guitry

My commentary on GNUnify