Fsf-friends December 2005

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

30 participants
45 discussions

GNU/HURD dics : i-hug
by isaac praveen 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

Hi, If anyone is a GNU/HURD user/developer, please register at http://i-hug.sarovar.org If you have any Debian/HURD CDs please make an entry on "HURD CDs for Grab" section, so programmers nearest your locality could borrow the CDs from you. Thanks, Isaac Praveen LISP> (setf god (symbol-value god)) Warning: Declaring GOD special. Error: GOD is unbound.

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VTU FLOSS campaign in TOI
by Thejesh GN 13 Dec '05

13 Dec '05

Check this http://epaperdaily.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JQkcvMjAwNS8xM… If you are interested, you have updates here http://www.techmag.biz/vtu_floss_campaign_update -- Thanks, Thej http://www.techmag.biz

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One more Congress over
by doxa＠sancharnet.in 12 Dec '05

12 Dec '05

At last one more (?)Congress is over, where the extreme elements who kept up the proprietary tempo were at their best. After having hoodwinked the organisers with their sheer manipulative skills, these extremists had their proprietary market logic embedded in a draft document for ICT and e-Governance for Kerala. Not knowing that there is an upcoming generation of young kids across the State who are increasingly asking for Free Software in schools, these extremists are exposing themselves to the public, at a great risk to their (?)intellectual capital (vaporware). To a large extent the intended damage was lessened thanks to timely interventions from Arun and Joseph (Sasi, was missing from camera eyes) - but whatever little Arun and Joseph spoke, it made a huge difference. CK Raju Thrissur ------------- If pro is opposite of con, what is opposite of progress ? -- (C) GPL, hey don't steal this ---

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FS or MS?
by Laxminarayan Kamath 12 Dec '05

12 Dec '05

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=KOCHI&file_name=KOCH… -- Laxminarayan Kamath Ammembal (+91) 9342287956 laxminarayan(a)deeproot.co.in www.geocities.com/kamathln

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Can you help a younger user-group or two...
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 11 Dec '05

11 Dec '05

Durgapur LUG dgplug.org (also on yahoogroups) needs your help to build activities and share information there. So does the Manipur -- linux-manipur(a)yahoogroups.com Please help with either, if you can! Thanks, FN -- ------------------------------------------------------------- | India Linux Users' Group, Goa | | Join the friendly user group | | Mail list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa/join | ---------------------------------------------------------- | | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/teach-yourself-linux | | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa-announce | | http://www.iosn.net/country/india/organizations/ilug-goa/ | ------------------------------------------------------------- , , / \ .-. * SOFTWARE ((__-^^-,-^^-__)) (. .) * FREEDOM `-_---' `---_-' / V \ * SHARING `--|o` 'o|--' // \\ \ ` / /( )\ KNOWLEDGE IS POWER ): :( '.^^_^^.' SHARE IT EQUITABLY :o_o: \_/ \_/ "-"

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Branded servers that support Debian GNU/Linux
by Rishi 10 Dec '05

10 Dec '05

Hi Anyone's which branded servers that support Debian GNU/Linux? Regards -- Rishi

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FOSS.IN: A report (LWN)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/162669/4da8e19f0a8e228b/ FOSS.IN: A report [Posted December 7, 2005 by corbet] [LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! FOSS.IN 2005 has run its course. Your editor, having returned (sans luggage and with a seriously confused body clock) to a Colorado cold snap, will now set out to summarize this impressive event. This article is a companion to the first-day report already published. [FOSS.IN venue] FOSS.IN attracted something over 2700 attendees to a set of steel-and-canvas temporary buildings set up on the grounds of the Bangalore Palace. Speakers - mostly from India, but also coming from Australia, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, the US, and beyond - led sessions on a wide variety of topics. The audience was interested and engaged in a way not often seen at other events. FOSS.IN was a fun place to be. This report will not attempt to summarize the individual sessions. Those who are interested in further information should have a look at the numerous reports being posted on planet.foss.in. There are also quite a few photos available. On the last day of the conference, your editor delivered a brutally technical kernel programming talk to a crowd which nearly filled the 750-seat "Intel Hall." That is several times the number of people which normally turn up for that sort of session. These people were not just filling the seats; they asked no end of detailed questions during the session and after as well. Alan Cox's technical device driver talk drew an even larger crowd. An immediate conclusion which might be drawn is that Bangalore contains hundreds of programmers who are interested in - and capable of - hacking on the kernel. Even if only 10% of those attendees were truly active in kernel development, one would expect to see a significant amount of code from Bangalore working its way into the mainline kernel. And there are some Bangalore-based kernel hackers who are active on the mailing lists and who are contributing code. But their numbers are far smaller than one would expect after seeing how many people are interested and knowledgeable in this area. India is, as one developer put it, "the world's biggest consumer of free software," but it is not a huge contributor. Trying to reconcile this difference became one of your editor's primary objectives at FOSS.IN. It is not possible to claim that this objective was realized in any complete way. It has become clear, however, that a few forces are at play here. One of them become evident early on: of the numerous questions asked privately by attendees, quite a few had to do with binary-only kernel modules. It seems that the challenges involved in maintaining proprietary modules - the changing kernel API, GPL-only exports, etc. - are proving frustrating to deal with. But more to the point: it seems that a significant percentage of these kernel developers are engaged in the writing of proprietary code. Your editor was far from the only speaker to sermonize about the problems inherent in proprietary code and the importance of contributing back to the community, but, if Indian companies are demanding the creation of proprietary code, that's what their employees will write. [Neeti] Another important factor was revealed in a talk given by Neetibodh Agarwal, and in various discussions which followed. Neeti was called upon to set up a development team for Novell in Bangalore, and he was struck by just how difficult that was to do. There are, it seems, a number of reasons why Indian developers have a difficult time engaging with the free software development community. By several accounts, the problem starts with the university system. The Indian universities are strongly oriented toward the creation of employable graduates in large numbers; a number of FOSS.IN attendees described them as "assembly line" operations. There is a strong emphasis on passing tests and getting through the system on schedule, and, it seems, little interest in encouraging creativity and curiosity in the students. The universities were described as a conformist environment with little love of those who have their own ideas of how things should be done. The end result, as expressed to your editor, is that most students have had any love of hacking beaten out of them by the time they graduate. The fact that the universities are, for the most part, hostile to Linux and free software does not help either. Neeti's talk described Indian developers as needing to have their jobs laid out to them in great detail. They want to know where their boundaries are, and are uncomfortable if left to determine their own priorities and approaches. Your editor's initial reaction was that this claim sounded like classic talk from a pointy-haired boss who does not trust his employees to make decisions. Subsequent discussions backed up Neeti's claims, however. A few Indians told me that Indian employees require a high degree of supervision; perhaps that is why the pizza stand at the site required two-levels of necktie-wearing bosses who apparently did little to actually get pizza into the hands of conference attendees. It is not that Indians lack the intelligence to function without a boss breathing down their neck - that is clearly not the case - but all of their training tells them to work in that way. So if one were to construct a stereotypical picture of an Indian software developer, it would depict a person who sees programming very much as a job, and not as an activity which can be interesting or rewarding in its own right. This developer is most interested in getting - and keeping - a stable job in a country where an engineering career can be a ticket to a relatively comfortable middle-class existence. Keeping that job requires keeping management - and coworkers - happy, and not rocking the boat. For such a developer, the free software community is not a particularly attractive or welcoming place. A developer who contributes to a free software project may earn a strong reputation in the community, but that reputation is not appreciated by that developer's employer or co-workers, and is not helpful for his or her career. Criticism from the community - even routine criticism of a patch by people who appreciate the developer's contributions in general - can be hurtful to a career in a culture where open criticism is not the normal way of doing things. Developers who expect to have their job parameters laid out to them in detail may feel lost in a project where they are expected to find something useful to do, and push it forward themselves. And these developers, while being possibly quite skilled in what they do, often have no real passion for programming, and leave it all behind when they leave the office each day. It also does not help that, at this point, would-be contributors have few role models in India. In the long term, many of these problems may go away. For now, however, getting Indian programmers into the community will require some extra care. Often, it will be necessary to engage (respectfully) with their supervisors: in most cases, if an Indian is working with the community, it is because his or her boss is making it happen. Being careful with criticism and avoiding creating trouble for Indian developers in their work hierarchies can only help. And, obviously, an important step will be the creation of a vibrant free software community in India. This community can provide inspiration, mentoring, and support for [Gentoo booth] aspiring contributors; it could also provide a pool of free software programmers from which employers could hire. The seeds of this community were clearly visible at FOSS.IN - in fact, many FOSS.IN attendees are poorly described by (and probably somewhat offended by) the caricature presented above (please accept your editor's apologies). Dozens of Indian free software hackers got up on stage and presented their work at this event. Interestingly, the distribution most in evidence at FOSS.IN was Gentoo, rather than one of the products of the commercial distributors who are steadily employing more developers in Bangalore. The Ruby hackers - unlikely to be working at the behest of their employer at this stage - essentially had their own one-day track at the event. Harald Welte's session on hacking the Linux-based Motorola a780 phone attracted a very high level of interest. There is, clearly, a lot going on in India even now; it will be most interesting to watch the level of activity explode as the local community develops. Events like FOSS.IN are crucial for the development of this community. So it is unfortunate that this event is currently dealing with some serious financial problems. A sponsorship shortfall led to a reduction in the conference program, and it leaves the organizers with a financial gap that they are struggling to close. Given this situation, it is worth noting that the list of conference sponsors (which includes Intel, Google, Sun, and HP) is missing the names of a few companies which work with free software, and which have a presence in Bangalore. In particular, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat all declined to sponsor FOSS.IN this year, even though many of their employees were using their vacation time to attend. Local companies, such as Wipro and InfoSys, were represented in the audience and among the speakers, but did not sponsor the event. If these companies see any benefit in having a thriving community to support their developers, sponsoring an event like FOSS.IN should look like an inexpensive way to help bring that community about. Your editor thanks FOSS.IN (and its sponsors) for making it possible for him to be there. It was a fun and informative event in an interesting and changing part of the world.

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[Fwd: [FSFE PR][EN] FSF Europe Newsletter]
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

-------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Free Software Foundation Europe <press(a)fsfeurope.org> Reply-To: press(a)fsfeurope.org To: announce(a)fsfeurope.org, discussion(a)fsfeurope.org, press-release(a)fsfeurope.org Subject: [FSFE PR][EN] FSF Europe Newsletter Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2005 18:30:27 +0100 1. First Austrian Fellowship meeting 2. Tweakfest in Zürich 3. UN World Summit on Information Society 4. LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt/Main 5. Seminar in Dublin about preventing software patentability 6. Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Rosario (Argentinia) 7. LinuxDay in Italy 8. Removal of Free Software from WSIS "Vienna Conclusions" 9. Welcoming the Free Software Foundation Latin America 1. First Austrian Fellowship meeting Karin Kosina and Reinhard Müller organized the first Austrian Fellowship meeting, where Fellows and other people interested in the work of the FSFE could meet, get information about the FSFE and share experiences and opinions about Free Software. Due to the positive feedback from the participants, such meetings will be organized about bi-monthly in Vienna, and other members of the FSFE are starting to organize similar events in other cities. All these events will, as usual, be announced on the Fellowship website. http://www.fsfe.org/ 2. Tweakfest in Zürich The Zürich Academy of Design and Art was the location for the two-day digital media and arts conference "Tweakfest 2005 - Visions of Digital Life Style". Georg Greve gave a keynote about the significance of digital freedom, the global situation of knowledge regulation and afterwards participated in a panel discussion titled "Copy Right". He also enjoyed seeing dancing robots, which you can read about on his blog: http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/back_from_tweakfest_ch_2005 3. UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) The UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) has seen an impressing amount of media coverage during the last month; mainly because of the discussions within the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The FSFE, however, has been involved in the WSIS process since its start, and much of the work involved over the last years has remained largely unrecognized by the public, even though it now turned out to be very valuable. In Bilbao in Spain, there was a Summit of Cities and Local Authorities in preparation of the WSIS in Tunis. Around 2000 local representatives from all over the world attended, and Jonas Öberg represented the FSFE. He made a presentation on freedom of information laws and how it relates to Free Software. FSFE's president Georg Greve participated in the second phase of the summit in Tunis, Tunisia, coordinating the drafting of the Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks (PCT) working group of Civil Society for the final Civil Society declaration, as well as documenting various of the interesting projects in his blog and having interesting discussions with many people. He also participated in a side event on the future of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), including WIPO deputy director-general Philippe Petit, which received much attention. http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/off_to_tunis 4. LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt/Main The FSFE was present with a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Volker Dormeyer, Joachim Jakobs, Myriam Schweingruber, Michael Kallas, Bernhard Reiter, Reinhard Müller, Cornelius Wasmund, and Matthias Kirschner were able to answer a lot of questions about Free Software on the booth. Again, Volker did a great job organizing FSFE's appearance at this event. 5. Seminar in Dublin about preventing software patentability Ciaran O'Riordan gave the keynote and participated in a lively questions and answers session, along with Gareth Bowker, in a seminar organised by O'Riordan with Irish Free Software Organisation. The audience included journalists, policy setters, and the largest of Ireland's pro software patent lobby groups. A transcript of the Questions and Answers session is online, and audio and video recordings should be online in the near future: http://ifso.ie/events/2005-11-18/ 6. 5th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Rosario (Argentina) The Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre are a wandering event in Argentina, and the 5th edition was organised by a very dedicated group of Free Software activists in Rosario. Georg Greve gave a keynote titled "Digital Freedom - why it matters and how to protect it" and used the opportunity to spend some time with the Latin American Free Software community. Also, after most of the event had been spent peer-reviewing the statutes and giving all conference participants the chance to comment, it then saw the official launch of FSFE's new sister organisation, the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA). In the name of the FSFE, Georg Greve participated as a guest to the official introduction and welcomed the FSFLA in the global network of Free Software Foundations. 7. LinuxDay in Italy The LinuxDay is a group of Free Software events all over Italy which is coordinated by the Italian Linux Society and organised by local user groups. FSFE participated for the first time this year at the national level sending a video message from Stefano Maffulli, wishing everybody a great day for the Italian Free Software community. The 8 minute video covered the history of the Free Software movement, the successes and the future battles, including IPRED2 and the fight against the infamous Legge Urbani. The video, only in Italian, is available at http://www.italy.fsfeurope.org/it/events/2005/linuxday/linuxday.en.html 8. Removal of Free Software from WSIS "Vienna Conclusions" In June 2005, FSFE members Georg Greve and Karin Kosina participated in the "ICT & Creativity" conference in Vienna. The outcome of this conference were the "Vienna Conclusions", which were substantially different from the text that the working group had concluded in Vienna: All references to Free Software had been removed, promotion of Digital Restriction Management (DRM) had been added, and statements about the central role of software for the digital society had been watered down -- apparently on request of Microsoft and IFPI. A more extensive summary about the entire proceedings can be found in a groklaw article written by Georg Greve: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051130185547876 9. Welcoming the Free Software Foundation Latin America With its involvement in UN Organisations like WSIS or WIPO, the Free Software Foundation Europe has extended its work beyond the borders of Europe. Looking at these experiences, the FSFE is more than ever committed to the concept of a world wide network of equal Free Software Foundations working together in intense cooperation. The entire Free Software Foundation Europe is proud and happy for its new sister organisation and is glad that it could do its part in helping to bring it about. The FSFE warmly welcome the FSFLA in the network of Free Software Foundations and looks forward to fruitful cooperation. You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html _______________________________________________ Press-release mailing list Press-release(a)fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release

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Sponsor .^.Calpp
by Ramanraj K 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

The Calpp project is hosted at: http://gborg.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/?cvsroot=calpp Calpp, released under the GNU GPL, is a framework to store procedures and execute them as proceedings. Recently, I made a presentation on "Calpp & .^.i" at the Tuxedo 05 event of SJCE, Mysore. The slides, that explain the need for good representations and the basic structure of Calpp are available online at: http://gborg.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/calpp/docs/calpp_ai.pdf?cvsr… Calpp will soon go online, thanks to the sponsorship by Anand Avati of ZResearch, and the support by Anand Babu, co-founder of ZResearch, specialising in Supercomputers and Superstorage. This would be .^.#1 host on the Home Planet :) I recently applied for a Fellowship from Sarai,and its details are at: http://gborg.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/calpp/docs/calpp_proposal_to… Free Software and the Internet together could become a paradise for Law. Calpp Project aims to port Law to computers. If Law, .^.i, and society excite you, welcome aboard! -Ramanraj K __ OED says- sponsor: a person who introduces and supports a proposal for a new law

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Fwd: Call to vote against software patents in "European of the Year" poll
by Anivar Aravind 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Sullivan <johns(a)fsf.org> Date: Oct 26, 2005 8:30 PM Subject: Call to vote against software patents in "European of the Year" poll FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE LUMINARIES CALL ON WORLDWIDE COMMUNITY TO VOTE AGAINST SOFTWARE PATENTS IN THE "EUROPEAN OF THE YEAR 2005" INTERNET POLL Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius endorse Florian Mueller's candidacy "because he runs on a NoSoftwarePatents ticket, and that is the message we want to reinforce" Brussels (20 October 2005) -- A group of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) celebrities has weighed in on the election of the "European of the Year 2005" by calling on "software developers and users around the globe" to vote for Florian Mueller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, in a public online poll. The illustrious consortium consists of--in alphabetical order of last name--Alan Cox, Red Hat Fellow and Linux kernel maintainer; Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP programming language; Tim O'Reilly, book publisher and conference organizer; Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation (who in 1984 began the work that produced today's popular GNU/Linux operating system); and Monty Widenius, creator of the MySQL database. In a NoSoftwarePatents press release, the community leaders today expressed their support for the voting recommendations that NoSoftwarePatents.com has published in more than a dozen languages: http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/vote.html Participants in the poll are required to make a choice in each of ten categories, and the voting list provided by NoSoftwarePatents.com explains the role that various candidates played in the software patent debate so that voters can reward the opponents of software patents and penalize pro-patent politicians. On 22 September, Florian Mueller was nominated for the most prestigious award in EU politics, the "EV50 Europeans of the Year". The jury thereby recognized his political efforts against a legislative proposal that in his opinion would have legalized software patents in Europe. The European Parliament rejected the bill on 6 July by a landslide of 648-32 votes. Mueller, who stressed that he owes this nomination "to our entire community and especially to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII)", is credited with founding a multilingual campaign website, speaking out in the media and at public events, and lobbying MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) as well as governments and parliaments in select EU member states. The European Voice, a major EU-focused weekly, is now conducting an Internet poll in which Mueller runs against such famous contenders as U2 frontman Bono, Bob Geldof, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and political leaders including British prime minister Tony Blair, the outgoing German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and Schroeder's successor designate Angela Merkel. The poll is open to the worldwide public until 11 November. Mueller's endorsers pointed out that the FOSS community has played a particularly active role in the fight against software patents, but that software patents "threaten us all because they don't discriminate based on programming language, operating system, or licensing model". The group is "disconcerted by early reports" that the EU is now looking at alternative ways of giving software patents a stronger legal basis in Europe, such as an EU community patent regulation. The press release underscored the fact that "this is a campaign for a cause, not for a person": People are asked to vote for Mueller "because he runs on a NoSoftwarePatents ticket, and that is the message we want to reinforce". The NoSoftwarePatents.com label is right next to Mueller's name on the ballot (http://www.ev50.com/poll). The endorsement furthermore stated: "Some other nominees also stand for valid concerns and noble causes. However, those issues and individuals have already received a lot of coverage in the mass media, while the implications of software patents to the whole world, including developing countries, still require much more public awareness. In the sense that software patents monopolize mental steps, they are also a human rights issue." Mueller is confident that he can win the title of the "European of the Year" against his famous competitors in the light of the "indisputable e-campaigning power of the anti-software patent movement". In addition to a campaign statement and voting recommendations, the website provides an email form that allows supporters to spread the information (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/notify.html), and banners (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/banners.html). The two main slogans of the electoral campaign are "Vote against software patents" and "Vote for your right to program". Should he win the popular vote, Mueller said that "everyone is a winner". He promised "to donate the Microsoft-sponsored prize money to the FFII", without which he says he "probably wouldn't have become involved, let alone succeeded, in this political battle". The EV50 winners will be announced on 29 November. A gala evening at the Palais d'Egmont in Brussels will be hosted by former European Parliament President Pat Cox, who was hired by US corporations to lobby for software patents in the build-up to the 6 July vote. The EV50 awards are supported by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Sponsors include PR and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller, software maker Microsoft Corporation (a major owner and backer of software patents), and pharmaceutical giant Novartis. The European Voice is a publication of the Economist group. NOTE: Florian Mueller founded the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign in 2004 with the support of three corporate sponsors (1&1, Red Hat, MySQL AB), and managed it until March of 2005. He then gave his website to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), the leading European pressure group that opposes the patentability of computer programs. CONTACT INFORMATION Florian Mueller florian.mueller(a)nosoftwarepatents.com -- John Sullivan Program Administrator | Phone: (617)542-5942 x23 51 Franklin Street, 5th Fl. | Fax: (617)542-2652 Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA | GPG: AE8600B6 _______________________________________________ info-fsf mailing list info-fsf(a)gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-fsf -- Knowledge is power... share it equitably! http://www.gnu.org

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Fsf-friends December 2005