Original Message -----
From: "IT@School" <itschool(a)asianetindia.com>
To: <manjushmenon(a)hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 5:08 PM
Subject: Reply
> Mr.Manjush G. Menon
> We are not giving to depend totally on Ms. Products. Rather MS
> Office is taught along with open office and Windows along with Linux
> from this year. Arranging the resource persons for training an open
> software, making available the software, the maintenance of a help desk
> etc. are logistical issues which could not be immediately undertaken.
> We plan switch out to open software within three years.
> Executive Director
>
---- Original Message -----
From: Manjush G. Menon
To: itschool(a)asianetindia.com
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 5:46 PM
Subject: Respected sir,
From
Manjush G. Menon,
Sr.Programmer,
Sofker Solutions Pvt Ltd,
Kochi-18.
To
The Executive Director,
'IT @ SCHOOL' Project,
SCERT Buildings,
Poojapura,
Thiruvananthapuram-12.
Respected sir,
SUB: In protest against the inclusion of products from multinational companies
in the syllabus of 'IT @ SCHOOL'
It's a very dissappointing fact that when the whole world is moving towards
Free software, we at kerala are going behind a major MNC - Microsoft. I hereby register
my protest in such an act from 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project team.
Breaking of prototypes will definetly help us in finding economical and high quality
products for our future generation.
For students and programmers, the GNU Linux contains 'GNU Compiler Collections'
which includes C, C++, FORTRAN, PERL, TCL etc. Also, for DTP and other publishing purposes,
it includes GNU Office utilities like Abi-Word, gedit, and other worksheet utilities,
all these with a nominal cost of Rs 700-800/-. The software as it is, is free and
the cost is accounted towards the media (CD + Documentation) included.
By this letter, I urge you to take this matter seriously and suggest necessary modifications
in the action plan of 'IT @ SCHOOL' project.
Wishing you all the best and wishing all 'Students @ SCHOOL' a bright future,
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully
Manjush G. Menon.
______________________________________________________
Check out all the latest outrageous email attachments on the Outrageous Email Chart! - http://viral.lycos.co.uk
Thanks to George Lessard for posting this across. FN
---------- Forwarded message ----------
PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS
Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva is pushing legislation to obligate all
public institutions to convert exclusively to open-source software.
Open-source programs, embodied by the Linux operating system, have
underlying code available to anyone who wants to modify or customize it.
Such software, in unadorned form, can be downloaded from the Internet for
free. Villanueva hopes his measure triggers activity in Peru's software
industry by freeing programmers from the constraints of working with coding
controlled by a few large companies. Open-source could take the expense out
of software upgrades; which is important for a country like Peru that owes
about $30 million in overdue software license fees.
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury, AUTHOR: Associated Press]
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3531007.htm)
The book FLOSS Concept booklet http://wikibooks.org/wiki/FLOSS_Concept_Booklet is at the verge of completion. But I need some help with the following.
1. List of popular distributions that come with non-free software.
2. In the question "What kinds of problems might I expect to encounter using free software?". Write about inability to play encrypted DVDs? About the DMCA???
3. The answer to the question "I'm still not convinced. Surely a big computer company knows best when it comes to designing software? Why would I want to use software designed by an amateur?" has gathered a lot of meat. Can somebody summarize it?
4. There are some questions on Digital Commons. Does anybody have answers for it?
If there are any questions that might be useful for newbies please do add it...
Regards,
Vijay
--
______________________________________________
Check out the latest SMS services @ http://www.linuxmail.org
This allows you to send and receive SMS through your mailbox.
Powered by Outblaze
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Hi,
We have started work on developing an Indic version for the LyX WYSIWYM
tool for LaTeX. a blog has been created at
http://blog.sarai.net/community/indic_lyx/ . Though work started on 15
may, all entries have been put up today, so endure the clutter please.
please have a look and comment.
Amitabh Trehaan
_______________________________________________
Home: http://www.tug.org.in/
unsubscribe: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tugindia
Here is an update on the Open Access Initiative
--------------
From:
Stevan Harnad
<harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Reply-To:
BOAI Forum
<boai-forum(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To:
AmSci Forum
<american-scientist-open-access-forum(a)amsci.org>
Subject:
[BOAI] Elsevier Gives Authors Green
Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Date:
Thu, 27 May 2004 23:51:58 +0100
(BST)
Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a
full Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green
light to self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their
refereed postprints.
Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy
may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed
desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits
to research productivity and progress.
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html
There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who
have never understood the real meaning and nature of OA: "It's only the
final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF," "It does not include
republishing rights," "Elsevier is still not an OA publisher."
I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts,
and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full
benefits of OA require not one bit more -- from the publisher.
For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History)
is hereafter fully within its rights to say:
"If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim
it is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter
attested that it was
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl --
then if researchers are not now ready to *provide* that Open Access,
even when given the publisher's official green light to do so,
then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know)
what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access."
Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles
a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what
proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through
self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be
monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are
already green.
(The following Romeo summary stats are already out of date, because 1700
pale-green journals have now become bright green!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html
but we will soon catch up at: http://romeo.eprints.org/ [which is
under construction, waiting for full journal lists from each of the 93
publishers sampled so far].)
The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the
publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers
and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by
adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't
just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own
institution to providing it:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Stevan Harnad
--
V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>
