Issue 2 of Free Software Magazine is finally out! Download your PDF copy for
free from http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com
Contents...
o EDITORIAL / Your part-time job
The trials and tribulations of being a "computer person"
o FOCUS / The history and future of SMTP
by Kirk Strauser
SMTP's adaptation to a hostile Internet
o Filtering spam with postfix
by Kirk Strauser
Effective ways to reduce unwelcome mail
o Mail servers: resolving the identity crisis
by John Locke
How to get Dspam, Postfix, and Procmail to play well together
o TECH WORLD / Poking at ITunes
by Chris J Karr
A developer's guide to the iTunes platform
o Why free IT management tools are gaining traction
by Will Winkelstein
Enterprises are increasingly receptive to free software alternatives for
IT management.
o CASE STUDY: Mythic Beasts
By Tony Mobily
A small company specialised in Linux servers and amazing support
o Interview with Bernhard Reiter at aKademy
by Tom Chance
What we can do to promote the future of free software
o Hard passwords made easy
by John Locke
Creating strong memorable passwords using mnemonic devices and
word lists
o WORD WORLD / The FUD-based Encyclopedia
by Aaron Krowne
Dismantling fear, uncertainity, and doubt, aimed at Wikipedia
and other free knowledge resources.
o Guerrilla marketing
by Tom Chance
Part one: promoting community projects in the marketplace
o A law for free software
by Maureen O'Sullivan
Don't we have enough laws already?
o The Libre Culture Manifesto
by David M Berry, Giles Moss
A manifesto for free/libre culture
o Richard Stallman's blog
by Richard Stallman
Selected entries from Richard's blog (http://agia.fsf.org/rms-blog)
from November 2004 to December 2004.
75 PGS * WORLD-CLASS PRINTING, GET-UP * A DOWNLOAD AWAY * unbelievable?
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Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.nethttp://fn-floss.notlong.com
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Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle
The near final version of the IOSN-CDAC L10N How-To and Toolkit is now
available for a final round of comments and feedback.
http://anakin.ncst.ernet.in/~aparna/consolidated/CD/
Plase go through it and give your feedback as soon as possible.
Most probably, the guide will be licensed under "Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0".
Also can somebody throw me some light on the differences between GNU FDL
and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 ?
Thanks & Regards,
--
Rajendra Prasad Murakonda,
ETU division, C-DAC Mumbai (erstWhile NCST).
Off Phone : 91 22 27565303 extn : 302
Mobile(WLL) : 0 93235 83185
http://www.livejournal.com/~prodizy/
>we need to find out how to submit guidelines. Should'we submit them
>immediately to the concerned. whom to send the guidelines.
>Nagarjuna
http://rajyasabha.nic.in/legislative/amendbills/ personal_law/pressrelease_rightbill.htm
I think we can incorporate our views here and have the same forwarded to watts(a)sansad.nic.in
In the meantime someone can explore who is after the Patents exercise.
CK Raju
_____________________________________________________________
LinuxTimes.Net --> An Online Linux Magazine
http://hiisi.fi/blog/post/2005/02/18/linux-asia-2005/
2005/2/18
Linux Asia 2005
Filed under:
* Free Software
-- Niklas Vainio @ 13:49
...
First day was on Linux on desktop and support. Professor Deepak Phatak gave
some interesting figures. In India, there are 7 PCs per 1000 citizens, in China
that is 37 per 1000. Average price of computer is now 30 000-40 000 Rs. First
500 million computers are in the developed world, the next 500 million should
come from Asia and Africa. To make that possible, there should be more
investments in India and the cost of computer, including software should drop
to 1/4th of current, i.e. to 10 000 Rs. At the moment, India is a "net taker"
in the open source movement, but in few years it should become a "net giver".
Dr. Phatak is currently running a program to get computer science students
involved in open source development.
Matthew Szulik of Red Hat said basically that customers don't want operating
systems, they want solutions and that Red Hat doesn't sell operating systems,
it sells subscriptions. Ju"rgen Geck of Novell SUSE had an interesting parallel
of the early history of automobile industry. Henry Ford didn't only invent the
assembly line, he also created open standards - standard screws, bolts etc.
Second day was about storage and high performance computing. I was getting flu
and wasn't so interested in the topic so I skipped most of the day.
Third day was the most interesting for me. Jitendra Shah spoke about his
Janabhaaraati Live CD with localized software. He said a couple of things I
hadn't thought about the use of IT in government offices. For government use,
you need: Indian language support, office tools, printing, network,
communication utilities, document management, search in Indian languages, name
translitteration, GIS and low-cost support (can IBM/Red Hat/Novell do that?).
The most interesting session was an ad-hoc session right after the official
program about why Open Source still hasn't gotten off in India yet. This
session had the most discussion and argumentation, about piracy vs. free
software etc. Somebody from the audience criticized David Axmark (of MySQL)
that it's easy for him to develop software and give it away since he's from a
social democracy. On one hand it's very true that FLOSS has hidden assumptions
on the background of the free software hacker. A large part of free software is
software somebody wrote on their free time. Not everybody can afford that. On
the other hand, freedom of the software is part of the strategy of MySQL - it
wouldn't have become so great piece of software if it hasn't been free. Same
applies to Linux, gcc, KDE, Firefox and many others.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.nethttp://fn-floss.notlong.com
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Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle
Shouldn't we be joining such initiatives? FN
Vidyadhar Gadgil reminds us of a protest in Panjim to mark Anti-Patents Day
for Drugs. The Indian Patent (Amendment) Bill is likely to be passed in the
Parliament in March 2005. However, it is seen as draconian, since it would
cause prices of essential medicines to go out of reach of common man.
A Global Campaign has been launched around the world against this Indian
Patent (Amendment) Bill. February 26, 2005 (Saturday) is going to be
observed as the Anti Patents Day for Drugs.
On this day, the world over, rallies, campaigns, etc., are being
organized. Here, in Goa, a people�s protest rally has been organized by
Positive People in Panjim on 26th February 2005 starting at the Panjim
Church steps at 10.a.m. The rally will move through the city and
culminate at Azad Maidan after which a delegation will be forwarding a
memorandum to the Chief Minister of Goa.
We call upon all of you to join us at the rally, and protest against the
Patent Amendment Bill.
Yours in Solidarity
Positive People.
Convener: Raj Vaidya Co-Conveners: Reggie Gomes & Cynthia Andrade
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.nethttp://fn-floss.notlong.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle
Nagarjuna G. wrote:
>just wanted to make a minor correction in the account that gnoware is
>different from GNOWSYS. you mentioned gnoware, where it should be
>GNOWSYS.
>
Oops ;)
Gnow these :)
GNOWSYS is an acronym for Gnowledge Networking and Organizing SYStem and
a pun on gnosis as well.
http://www.gnowledge.org/GNOWSYS/Programs/Data/ObjectType/G/GNOWSYS/viewObj…
GNOWARE is the name of a GNU/Linux distro ( www.gnoware.org )
GNOWLEDGE at http://web.gnowledge.org/ gives more info about the things
to gnow.
Part of the argument during our travel together, was that oop is not
suitable for gnowledge like services. oop serves computer programs
themselves well, but the same is not suitable for modeling the real
world. An elaborate discussion about that is available at:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm
These guys, young friends from West Bengal, are trying to get the tribal
Santhali language working with Free Software.
Below is a self-explanatory entry from http://blogs.randomink.org/ It is from
"Weekend Aantel". Sayamindu from Kolkata was mentioning the Santhali project
recently.
[Wikipedia has this to say about Santhali, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhali: Santali is a language in the Munda
subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. It is spoken by about
six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Most of its
speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Orissa,
Tripura, and West Bengal. It has its own alphabet, known as Ol Cemet', but
literacy is very low, between 10 and 30%. Santali is spoken by the Santhals.]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Adieu Mandal Hembrom!
Weekend Aantel 21/02/2005 - 17:23 Mandal Hembrom passed away at TMC,
Mumbai, today in the early morning. He was under-going treatment at TMC. I
don't yet have the details of the exact cause of death, but so far it is known
that his condition detoriarated after he underwent Chemotheraphy and lapsed
into a severe cardiac arrest.
Mandal-da was the lead linguist (as also being a native speaker) in our
Santhali CASTLE Project. His death is not just a great loss to our project, but
a loss to all the Santhals struggling to establish their identity in a
globalised world that dictates a lop-sided homogeneity at the cost of losing
unique cultural traits, language and social structures.
Mandal-da's illness was detected at an advanced stage. He wanted to use the
time he had to complete the work on the translation of the strings.
Unfortunately, he was taken away from us before that could happen! Perhaps, its
a strange co-incidence that today happens to be the International Mother
Language Day (21st Feb) that Mandal-da breathed his last.
We need to reaffirm our commitment to the work on bridging the ICT divide. As I
wrote in my "A walk across the Digital Divide" experience, its not as
un-bridgable as it often sounds. Its only by ensuring the continuance of the
Santhali L10N project that we can truly pay our respect to the dreams and
efforts of Mandal Hembrom.
END OF QUOTE
On behalf of BytesForAll, let me dip our flag to all these guys trying to make
computing work for for forgotten people and the poor... whose languages
otherwise barely make for a 'viable market'. FN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.nethttp://fn-floss.notlong.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle
Archana, i think you have to create an acc in that
site and then start looking at the blogs. I think u
can only watch the blogs with the id and passwd given.
When i registered, i received a mail like..,
vishravars,
You may now log in to
http://blogs.randomink.org/user/login using the
following username and
password:
username: vishravars
password: xxxx
*Your new Blogs @ Random Ink membership also enables
to you to login to other Drupal powered websites (e.g.
http://www.drop.org/) without registering. Just use
the following Drupal ID and password:
Drupal ID: vishravars(a)blogs.randomink.org
password: kLQfTEkqVd
I think, that answers you question.
Cheers
Vishravars.R
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Hi Everybody. This is my first mail to FSF-Friends ml.
I am trying to nerrate an incident which took place
today morning when i was travelling to my college by
my motorcycle.
Situation:
It was a double road, with a partition in the centre.
It was early morning and the weather was really cold.
I could see many young students waiting on the road
side for their school buses to come and some were
waiting for the city corporation bus. All the vehicles
were just flying in a hurry.
----------- x ------------
When i was riding, i suddenly saw a old man with a
bicycle on the middle of the road struggling with lots
of tomatos (it seems he had bought some tomatoes from
the market early morning and taking them to his retail
shop located somewhere in the city). The problem was,
he had 2 huge baskets on both sides of his bicycle and
hence could he could not get off from the cycle
easily(and he was also a short guy). There were lots
of tomatos on the ground, spread. And thank god there
was not much damage (to the tomatoes). By seeing the
poor man struggling to get those tomatoes, i just
parked my motorcycle on the side of the road and i
took tomatoes in my hands and helped to get them to
the baskets. Roughly it was about 150-200 tomatoes.
When i started picking them, one more guy who came
that way started picking and helping. The problem was,
it was a really busy road, and vehicles were just
flying. I thought i should also direct the traffic so
that the other person can continue picking the
tomatoes. I did exactly that, and the whole mess got
cleared in just 8 to 10 minutes. The tomato guy
thanked me and the other person *whole-heartedly*.
Then i started my journey to the college.
Moral of My Blog:
------------------
I would like to associate the incident with the Free
Software movement or the idea of free s/w.
The first thing is, the tomato guy is now way
connected with me (ofcourse he is not my boss or i am
not a boss to him) and i'v never seen him before, in
simple words, a stranger. But what made me to help
him????
The following could be the reasons.....
1. The tomato guy was an obstacle to the traffic and i
thought of helping the traffic to get cleared
2. I am really a soft hearted and could not see the
preson struggling on the middle of the road, hence i
helped.
3. It's my duty to help the one who is struggling...
4. or just thought of helping... thats all
etc......
Well, in all the above said, one word stood still like
concrete, that is *helping*.
Ok. What do i get, by doing so?
My Answer :- Peace of mind.... and self-satisfaction..
or what ever one may call this as
As we see the above lines, there is no word like Money
or Rupee or Cost or Price or dollar or ......
Can this be associated with free s/w??
My Answer: Yes.
How ?
Ans: It is not that you should help your neighbour
alone... but you (and we) can also help strangers...I
hope Free Software does exactly that...
Why am i making a blog like this ??
Ans. That again sharing my thoughts and hence
*Freedom* to share thoughts..... :)
PS: There were many people on the road side waiting
for bus to come. But no one can blame them for not
helping the poor guy. B'cause, they will be under
trouble if they miss their bus.
Cheeeers
Vishravars.R
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