Suraj Kumar wrote:
While I think communism is partly a solution to removing proprietary software companies and make it a state-owned affair, the current "trend" of these politicians will make it a worse environment for free software to thrive.
Though this is no place to discuss capitalism & communism, I would like to point out that a very good author on this topic is Ayn Rand. She fled from Russia, settled in USA and hence she could write about both of the philosphies using first hand knowledge. The very idea of communism is wrong. Why should "some one produce according to ones ability and get paid according to his needs."
However lets leave that aside and talk about Indian politicians. Passing laws to make something 'mandatory' is worse. We should be able to show the people that options much better than M$ exist.Not many people know excellent support is available in GNU/Linux. Many still think that we are still stuck in the CLI. How many people in your neighbourhood know about OpenOffice, TeX? A few people were shocked when I told them that some quite competent pfellows hang around on LUG mailing lists and jobs recruitment can be done on LUGs.(happily they have agreed to try to use it next time,lets hope) People should know about something's existence before they can use it.
I think spreading the word should be our first priority. Putting out articles in magazines, newspapers, conferences, college magazines should not be looked upon as unnecessary