Finally, after three weekends of planning, cutting and stitching I managed finishing my first stuffed-toy, the TUX. Its now part of my workplace.

Unfortunate for me, very few people are ready to believe that I made this. Of course mom helped me by stitching all the complicated curves, but It's me who did the calculation of shape, did the cutting and even stitched the simple straight ones. Will soon make another one - a smaller one that would fit in my office drawer ;)

For those who want more surprises, bunny is planning for another new hobby - bonsai. I am ofcourse with bunny in this too.

btw... this TUX is our new mascot (for me and bunny, in our cubicle).
More images of my stuffed-tux available on the medhas.org gallery.

Thinking about my 'long term' goals brought me to a rather general topic - How ethical are corporate ethics? What is more important - personal ethics or corporate ethics? I personally have a big list of can-be-done and cannot-be-done rules, which I respect a lot and try my best to live complaint to them. Here are a few things.

• Should be loyal to the company - Ofcourse, we should be loyal to the company that we work for. Nothing happens without loyalty. I am loyal. I give my 100% when I work and would not, even in my dreams think of being disloyal to my company. This is part of my personal ethics too. With all this, I expect my company to be loyal too. It should take care of me, my needs and my environment.
  
• Notice before quitting the job - Will the company give a notice before asking me to leave the company for any reason? If my company is ready, then I am - afterall every agrement should be mutual.
  
• X years bond in return for the training - Is the training really worth that much? The cost of breaking the agrement should be reasonable. Its not the case in many companies :(
  
• Should not be on the rolls of another company - I do not agree with this point. How does it matter as long as I am loyal to my employer? Is it not sufficient if I keep both the works separate? Its my life and I am not a bonded labour.
• Intellectual property - many companies claim all publications by the employees to be theirs, irrespective if how relevant the publication is to the type of work the employee is assigned to. Do the employers expect the employees to be not creative? Does the employee not have the freedom to think in his off-work timings and publish his findings?

Please do post your comments. I would love to see what others feel in this aspect.

One thing... the rate at which I blog went down significantly, is it because there is nothing special that I came across or just that the initial 'JOSH' has come down?
May be, its neither of the two but I am busy with a lot of other things - Sorting out a few sensitive and important issues, schedules at my work and developing a new hobby of stuffed-toy making are a few of them.
Me and bunny started thinking seriously about making our workplace a much better and an enjoyable place to work. Both of us zeroed in on adding another member to our cubicle - the Tux, and this adding-tux-to-our-workplace thing kept me busy developing the new hobby of stuffed-toy making. With about half the work done, I would soon be posting photos of my workplace and my first stuffed-toy too :)

Keep visiting!

This is not a formal FAQ on free software, but as in case of "How to learn GNU/Linux?" there are many more frequently asked questions about free software as a philosophy and as software. A formal information on free software, the free software foundation and the GNU are available on www.gnu.org
 
So... here come the questions I had to answer the most :)

1. What is free software
According to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), "free software" is a matter of liberty and not price. FSF also defined the four freedoms of software.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
  
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
  
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits
  

A free software has all the freedoms listed above. None of the above freedoms are about the cost of software. A free software can be sold, but to meet two (second and fourth) of the prescribed four freedoms, the source code will have to be distributed too!

2. What are the advantages of going free
You like the software? Go give it to your friend and no one is going to sue you for that. That is not all, you have the source code and can modify the program to suit your needs, audit the source to make sure the code is bug free. In simple words - "do what you want, change any part of it and share it with your friends".

3. What is the difference between open-source and free-software.
As far as I understand, free-software can be seen as a significant subset of the open-source software. Open source softwares are those softwares that give the source code, but its not necessary that you get all the freedoms too. A necessary and sufficient condition for a software to be open software is availability of source code, but for a software to be free, its necessary that the users get all the four freedoms of software.

4. Quality - Is free-software comparable to the commercial software?
Many people mis-understand the concept of free-software. Free software need not be free in terms of price and in most cases free-software is of much better quality. As an example search for comparisions between Firefox and Internet Explorer, between Apache HTTP Server and Microsoft IIS server, etc.