Prasad

GLUG: GNU/Linux User Group

Part of our 21st July campaign is formation of GLUGs all through the state of Andhra Pradesh and inspire these groups to spread the use of GNU/Linux. The GLUGs that we are thinking of are not just "users groups", they are expected to go much beyond...

Though I would not completely agree with the fact that the rural India is ready for a rapid penetration of computers... I think it can slowly start. People need to know what computers can do for them, they have to feel the need for computers and that feeling and the dissatisfaction would bring the next revolution. Again, its my opinion and I would not mind trying other ways of spreading computing to rural India... after all, as bunny puts it, trying it out can only have a zero impact if not a positive impact.

Now, when people start using a computer they would come across all those difficulties that we the so-called computer literates came across when we first used the comps. Fortunately, we had our instructors and friends who helped us out. A GLUG should be the same instructor/friend to the people around their college. Only then a unit would be self-supporting and that would infact improve usability and peneration of computers in rural India. GLUG as defined by its role, will be a very important unit of the Free Software Revolution in India.

FSF AP now had a strong network of people trying to build GLUGs in the engineering colleges all through the AP and hope the GLUGs thus formed sustain the self-supporting units in their areas!

Freedom by 21st July

Long since I blogged and in the process left out many activities that are worth more than a simple mention in my blog! In the last couple of weeks, we have been coordinating with the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF), Andhra Pradesh chapter to bring computers and Swecha in particular to the rural parts of Andhra Pradesh.

On the 24th and 25th of June we had a workshop at IIIT Hyderabad. The response was great and the participation clearly meant a great future for free software and for the rural India!!!

Session 1 (Philosophy)

Welcome note by Dr.Rajeev Sangal (Director, IIIT)
FSF Philosophy by Kiran Chandra (FSF-AP)

Session 2 (Paradigm Shift)

Proprietary to Free Software by Bunny and me :)

Session 3 (Techie)

Networking in GNU/Linux by Prof. Reddy (JNTU Kakinada)

Session 4 (Future work)

Discussions about formation of GLUGs
Closing note and conclusions

Finally the outcome of the workshop was to bring Swecha to 21 villages, create 21 GLUGs to support the spread of free-software and have a common collaboration platform... all by the 21st of July!!!

Have I found what I love?

Read the commencement address by Steve Jobs at the stanford university and kept thinking about what I loved and if I knew what I like? Well, am not sure if what I think I like is what I actually like. If I knew it, then I would probably have been one of Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs himself!
Keeping the question "Have I found what I love?" aside... I think there are more questions for me to answer to myself... hope asking myself these questions daily would help!

What am I doing to realize what I like?
Did yesterday take me any closer to my dream and will today do?
Is this dream dependent on others too? Am I doing something to inspire them?

Apart from asking myself these questions... I hope the curve stays positive :)

Alan Cox on writing better software

This is what Cox had to say when speaking at the launch of an advanced technical computing group for Wales, run by IT Wales, part of Swansea University's computer science department.

"A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world"

Don't know how i missed this, but this is the first time read this article. The complete article can be found here...

Brain Drain -- version 2.0

Yesterday bunny asked if I had some "ultimate opinions in life", something that I keep thinking of [about my future?]... and before I could say anything much he asked me my opinion about 'management studies'. My answer, as most of you can guess was "management? forget it!"

We had a small discussion following it which was mostly about why good techies go to become bad managers, and today bunny found me a link that essentially summarizes our discussion.

A long time ago, people used to go to the US for a few simple reasons: better lifestyle, more prestige, and more money to be made. This used to be called "brain drain".

We've come a long way since then, and that migration has sort of reversed recently, both because India has gotten better, and because the US has gotten worse.

But has anyone else noticed an equally disturbing trend lately? I see quite a few techies going to management schools (aka "B Schools").

The title to this post was taken from the same article. The complete article is available here.

Back from Delhi

Just back from a 10 day trip to Delhi!
These 10 days are definitely unforgettable for many reasons other than just visiting places in and around Delhi. For people interested, the photos are available at http://www.medhas.org/gallery/

Software Patents in India

Happened to read an article (political?) about an amendment to the patent law in India. Here is what the article had to say about the amendment.

The Indian Patent Act, as modified in 2002 had made non patentable the following:
"a mathematical method or a business method or a computer prgramme per se or algorithms".

The recent amendment states instead:
"a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms;"

[...]

Why is patenting a problem for the software industry? After patenting was allowed in the US, smaller developers and independent software companies have been under severe attack. Large companies have the ability to buy up patents, keep on filing patents and can tie up smaller companies in costly law suits for years. Therefore, moving from a copyright regime to a software patenting one, simply makes the cost of developing new software many times higher. Copyright is virtually automatic, there are no costs associated with copyrights; patents have to be filed and filing imposes fairly high costs. If they have to be filed in a number of countries, the costs multiply.

Indian software industry is mostly based on services and has very few products to its credit, that also means that we have lesser original work and patents. Software patents becoming legal could mean supressing Indian software industry from entering the world software product market!

Given the disadvantages, NASSCOM is said to have supported the government too. Is NASSCOM which is known to represent the Indian software industry really representing the smaller companies???

[Thanks, rajan for the link]

Software Patents???

Was reading a few articles about software patents. I am pretty sure that more people than not are NOT AWARE of what could be the implications of software patents becoming legal. So here it is, an image from typo3.org which more or less summarises it.

Imagine paying royalty to someone just for using a progress bar or a tabbed dialog! yuck! It sucks.

Here are a couple of links for more information on software patents. No prizes for discovering that these links are among the first few google results for "software patents":

Missing a "meta content-type" tag

Now that I worked on the eenadu2utf thing for a while, I got used to having look at the eenadu site. When I did that today morning, I was surprised to see that barely anything could be readable on the site... So what was the problem?

A missing "meta content-type" tag, the browser (firefox) failed to recognize the encoding used in the page (homepage of eenadu.net) and hence was not able to display the text!

I am sure the folks at eenadu would have tested the page before uploading it to the server, but the worst thing did happen, they probably tested it on "Internet Explorer" only.

This probably is another great disadvantage of unusual encodings - the browsers don't recognize them.

Eenadu 2 UTF

Eenadu is one of the most read news papers in Telugu. The online edition of the paper is at http://www.eenadu.net/. Don't worry if you cannot read it, the site currently uses a strange
encoding, which can probably only be displayed using the "eenadu" font which is downloadable from the site. There is a huge telugu corpus going waste in a proprietary encoding! huh!

Apart from a few other things, this was one that kept me busy for the last week, finally after hacking the font, and reverse engineering their encoding, I could create a script/program that converts a given html page from eenadu.net to a UTF-8 encoded web page.

For now, the script can probably be used only to convert pages one after other, but if every thing goes right, it should be possible to convince the eenadu team to migrate to unicode... Hope it turns out this way!!!