Fsf-friends November 2002

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

43 participants
108 discussions

(no subject)
by Nice Calicut 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

Hello, This commercial stuff is triggered by the misguiding offer of "Free" RedHat CDs, which turned out to be Rs.230/-. However this is not a free offer. NICE , Calicut offer the following Free Software Services. 1. Two Weeks course covering GNU/Linux basics, KDE, OpenOffice Rs. 200/- 2. GNU/Linux Installation (1 day) Rs. 100/- 3. Above two along with basic sysadmin, networking and Setting up Terminal Server Rs. 750/- CDs for all major distributions also Aailable ( Rs. 40/- per CD) 1. RedHat 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 2. Mandrake 9.0 3. RedHat (Pre-configured) to install from a single CD with OpenOffice and some science packages. National Institute of Computer Education Satheesh Building, Kallai Road Calicut 673 002 Ph: (off) 0495 300040 (res) 0495 355415 with regards NICE

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Seeking Volunteers
by Tarun Gaur 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

Hi Friends, SEEKING VOLUNTEERS! ZERO ADMINISTRATION SERVERS The ZServers project intends to create highly scalable distributed Servers that require minimum or no configurations, enabling the network administrators scale their networks with ease. The first step in this direction is: Linux Internet Information Server: To give you a head start, In stage I, we intend to create a lookalike of Internet Information Server which can manage ftp, www etc from one point. Keeping the look and feel the same is important as it can help network administrators migrate with ease. we are working on the analaysis of this product and will soon put it across. We invite developers with knowledge of Glade and shell scripts to join hands. Mail me at tarun.gaur(a)i3genesys.com with "ZServers" as the subject. Regards, Tarun Gaur _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

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[bytesforall_readers] About Shiksha, Narayana Murthy and Bill gates..
by FREDERICK NORONHA 25 Nov '02

25 Nov '02

Just to point out that this issue is being debated beyond Free Software/Open Source mailing lsts. Some relevant questions below... FN ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: RE: [bytesforall_readers] About Shiksha, Narayana Murthy and Bill gates.. Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 17:21:21 -0000 From: Murali Shanmugavelan <MuraliS(a)panoslondon.org.uk> To: "'Frederick Noronha '" <fred(a)bytesforall.org> The Project mission and its gensis: Shiksha India is a non-profit initiative, aimed at bridging the digital divide in India. This project was conceived of by the Global Leaders for Tomorrow of the World Economic Forum, incubated by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Who's who: "Shiksha India's mission is computer literacy -- a basic skill that blue collar workers like mechanics and rural citizens like farmers will find useful in their daily lives. It will substantially increase the earning capacity of mainstream India in direct and indirect ways and also help in bridging the digital divide that exists in India " said N. R. Narayana Murthy, trustee of Shiksha India (from Schoolsonline.org) Does Mr. Bill's donation to Shiksha and his choice of NGOs tell us anything? The Political economy of NGos have powerful roles in informing and shaping policies in today's informing society. Especially, when the political economy is governed by business corporations. I would like to know if there are examples as to how many ICT4D projects have implemented non-microsoft platforms to increase the flow from and towards the poor and marginalised. Pointer URLs: http://www.weforum.org/site/homepublic.nsf/Content/The+World+Economi c+Forum+ Announces+Global+Leaders+for+Tomorrow+Task+Forces http://world-links.org/english/assets/india_project.pdf Murali Shanmugavelan. Panos Institute London. -------------------------------------------------------

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W3C Patent Policy (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha 25 Nov '02

25 Nov '02

---------- Forwarded message ---------- A good news for the Free Software community if this draft is adopted by the W3C. Don't hesitate to provide your input to promote RF. adulau -- -- Alexandre Dulaunoy -- http://www.foo.be/ -- http://pgp.ael.be:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x44E6CBCD "People who fight may lose.People who do not fight have already lost." Bertolt Brecht ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 11:03:46 -0800 From: Lawrence E. Rosen <lrosen(a)rosenlaw.com> To: license-discuss(a)opensource.org, fsb(a)crynwr.com Cc: 'Robin 'Roblimo' Miller' <robin(a)roblimo.com>, Eben Moglen <moglen(a)columbia.edu>, bruce(a)perens.com Subject: W3C Patent Policy W3C (www.w3c.org) has just released the Last Call Working Draft of its patent policy (http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114) for "Last Call" review. Some of you may remember that an earlier draft of that policy provided for the possible payment of "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) royalties in order to practice W3C specifications. That dreadful prospect is no longer in the policy. The draft policy now provides that all patents necessary to implement W3C specifications must be "royalty-free" (RF). If this draft is adopted by W3C, all specifications published by W3C can be implemented by anyone, anywhere, without payment of royalties. This is a major victory for open source. The open source community was represented on the Patent Policy Working Group by Eben Moglen, Bruce Perens and Larry Rosen. The community now needs to be heard supporting this policy so that it is not undone during the public input and W3C Advisory Council phase. Address your comments to www-patentpolicy-comment(a)w3.org. We hope that this RF policy will be adopted by other standards organizations around the world. /Larry Rosen -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3 _______________________________________________ Isdf mailing list Isdf(a)isoc.org http://www.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/isdf

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Those who know... those who must pay
by Frederick Noronha 25 Nov '02

25 Nov '02

Interesting. Even if it uses Free Software and Open Source as interchangeable terms. Thanks to Soundara Rajan N.S. in Mysore for forwarding this... "If the current stylistic distinctions between open-source and commercial software persist, an open-software revolution could lead to yet another divide between haves and have-nots: those with the skills and connections to make use of free software, and those who must pay high prices for increasingly dated commercial offerings." -- Scientific American

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(no subject)
by Tarun Gaur 24 Nov '02

24 Nov '02

Dear friend Suraj, We live in a world that moves at a very fast pace. In today's world, people value quality over price in most of the situations. And yes cost of ownership does matter, but never at the price of quality. Now, we are evangalists supporting the same movement. A movement that brings people and ideas togather to create free software. It intends to realize the vision of a genius called Richard Stallman. but friend, I have some questions for you. Do Richard Stallman and GNU ask us not to praise and be aware of what is happening in the properietary world ? Are we hampered by any force to write software as good as the properietary world ? when we can accompilsh extremely tech. stuff, does it take a herculian effort to beautify it and simplify the names of the software? Should we ignore the fact that the world leaders should be keenly observed and there success researched to pick up some good things that might help us create FSF into a more formidable force ? My previous posting was to help all our friends realize that we can improve. We can innovate. We can be the best and WE CAN be FREE. We can be technical yet touch the masses. ------------------- by Mr. Suraj -------------------------------------- your question is like, "Do the masses need a hut where they live happily or do they need the latest technology laser enabled cage where they get electrocuted?" We in the Free Software world donot care if our existing software cannot do everything that proprietary guys do. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- REPLY: Friend we have to care and improve. Thats how future is driven. We dont want to be philosophers in minority. Awareness of competetion is the key to "NOT REINVENTING THE WHEEL" and "CREATING BETTER SOFTWARE" WE NEED TO OBSERVE,ACT AND IMPROVE. Now, friend suraj, you are very right when you say praising wont help. So, friends, i give you a head start. We are already working on a project that integrates the "servers" that run on Linux, into services that can be controlled from one point and that minimises the administration. I invite all my friends to come and join me in the endeavor. This is a small step towards "Scalable, Distributed Zero Administration Servers" ... We call the project as ZServers. Friends, this project is the first in line ... We in pune are working in three different teams of 10 people each on some amazing software for linux. We indend to throw all the software to FSF one by one. If any of my friends are interested to join hands ... Please mail me at: tarun.gaur(a)i3genesys.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Once Aki morito (Sony) was having a different opinion than his collegue. They had a heated disscussion. When Aki was asked about his reaction by another friend ... he said : If we agree to the same things, then one of us is redundant. We respect difference of opinion. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- leave you with this thought, Tarun Gaur >From: Suraj Kumar <suraj(a)symonds.net> >To: Tarun Gaur <gaur_tarun(a)hotmail.com> >CC: fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in, fsf-discuss(a)mm.gnu.org.in >Subject: Re: [Fsf-friends] Lets Introspect and watch competition ... >Date: 24 Nov 2002 16:51:04 +0530 > > > DO YOU THINK WE (INTELLIGENT TECHIES) CAN REACH MASSES THIS WAY ? > > DO THE MASSES NEED "FREE SOFTWARE" OR "FREE GOOD AND EASY TO USE >SOFTWARE" > > ... > >your question is like, "Do the masses need a hut where they live happily >or do they need the latest technology laser enabled cage where they get >electrocuted?" > >We in the Free Software world donot care if our existing software cannot >do everything that proprietary guys do. Agreed, there may be a good >number of bleeding edge stuff coming out from the proprietary world. All >the bleeding edge becomes _their_ property. and its not something you >can enhance. Infact there have been a lot of such "bleeding edge" stuff >that donot let us even use it for any purpose. I have heard ppl from >research labs like the ISRO say that they had to reinvent the wheel many >a times just because an available proprietary software does not let them >use it for space research. As a programmer, Proprietary software is >_definitely_ not the best thing you can have. You can't modify it to fit >your purpose (atleast without paying a hefty sum to the owner of the >software). It is only something that you can keep "praising". do you >really want to do nothing in your life better than praising something >that does not give you the freedom? > >We are here to build a better place. Information needs to be free and >that will _not_ happen when its in the hands of people who talk about >'intellectual property'. Software will be useful in all the possible >ways only when its free. And thats where we in the Free Software world >give more powerful software to the masses than what the proprietary guys >do. > >Join hands, if at all you wanted to, we can write _good_ software. You >see, the word "good" has two meanings. :) > > -Suraj >-- >+--------------------------------------------<suraj(a)symonds.net>---+ >|I became conscious of the pangs of pallor in the absence | >|of my lover, as we see darkness in the absence of light | >|(pain of pallor and sallowness - 6), Thirukkural | >+---<http://symonds.net/~suraj/>-----------------------------------+ _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail

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Lets Introspect and watch competition ...
by Tarun Gaur 24 Nov '02

24 Nov '02

Hi Friends, This is my first mail to the community and be rest assured i am going to push this thing thru for a long time to come. In this first mail, i am keeping the topic of discussion very very generic. LETS INTROSPECT AND WATCH COMPETETION ... Is it mere incedental that when we talk of competition to FSF like revolution, name of Microsoft cant be avoided (we may like it or not). To give my friends an insight into microsoft future corp , i would really recommend you folks to take a look at this : http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/projects/ Now lets look at where we stand ... http://www.gnu.org/projects/projects.html We are no doubts as good as the folks at microsoft ... But we carry VERY GOOD HABITS of Naming our projects in greek and latin. and more so complicating the description of software even more. Just to add another example, look at the names of the utilities that come bundled with Red Hat/SuSe/GNU Linux versions etc. They are really good at scaring away a common user. (I have asked a lot of end users this question, and be sure they all agree). DO YOU THINK WE (INTELLIGENT TECHIES) CAN REACH MASSES THIS WAY ? DO THE MASSES NEED "FREE SOFTWARE" OR "FREE GOOD AND EASY TO USE SOFTWARE" ... _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Announcing DotGNU Portable.Net 0.4.8
by Gopal V 24 Nov '02

24 Nov '02

I just wanted everyone here to know about this .. we're tackling .NET in a positive way as well ... It's a frontline battle with .NET .... We've reached a position where gcc can get the whole build system up .. with that we've touched the 500,000 line mark as well ... (half a million !). Finally after months of hardwork and lots of coffee, the DotGNU Portable.Net team have finally got to building their libraries on any platform they choose to .. The so called "team" consists of lots of people , many of whom are coincidentially named "Rhys Weatherly" . The compiler is not really a compiler but more of a compiler shell ... So what we're really announcing is that our C# frontend and IL backend are working well with each other .. We're still playing around with JVM backends and planning a Parrot (of perl6 fame) backend. And maybe if you want your favourite language X to be supported , you could always write your own frontend (provided you are a CS student with a copy of the dragon book & lots of free time, like yours truly) . The runtime is such a similar flexible machinery which currently has only an IL frontend , but well we could always add more ... Now that we've got the distractions out of the way , let me tell you what's so special about this release. The C# compiler frontend is 95% of the way , written in C and very fast too . So you could say we're finally free of any dependency on ANY NON FREE TOOL . The runtime engine is also fast and can be trimmed to operate in low memory conditions (as low as 2 MB) ... Get the debian packages from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/dotgnu-pnet/debian/ We have finally arrived as 100% free software ... we can build the entire system with just the basic GNU tools and the release tarballs ... Hoping that everyone understands why we have to keep MS honest about C# and .NET ... Just hating its guts does not help too much to further GNU ... Help us make DotGNU bigger, better and free ! It's had contributers from a number of students in India ... (eg , one IISc guy is trying to port to IA-64) ... We're currently operating with 0 funding and volunteer contributions ... please lend a hand if you can. Code contributions or packaging or testing is appreciated ... demo'ing it at the LUGs is even more appreciated !.. Gopal -- The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success

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Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org Migration Guide
by Sayamindu Dasgupta 22 Nov '02

22 Nov '02

This one is still beta, but I found it to be quite good :) Large download, but worth it http://ooo.chbs.dk/mat/msoffice2ooo-migration-0.43cs.sxw -sdg- -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [ http://www.peacefulaction.org/sayamindu/ ] * GNU is Not Unix * .... Towards World Liberation .... http://www.gnu.org We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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RE: [ilugd]: TOI editorial plugs Linux
by akr!linux-delhi.org＠linux-delhi.org 22 Nov '02

22 Nov '02

so does an op-ed piece in the financial express today :) http://financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=22247 Original Message: ----------------- From: Raju Mathur raju(a)linux-delhi.org Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 12:26:05 +0530 Subject: [ilugd]: TOI editorial plugs Linux Today's TOI has a editorial piece on Microsoft that mentions Linux quite favourably. <snip> -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .

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Fsf-friends November 2002