On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 10:54 +0100, Juan Carlos Gentile Fagundez wrote:
I subscribed to this list to understand how Free Software - Free Knowledge is going on in India (since I'm from South-America and from Italy). (And specially Kerala since is apparently there where things are doing better).
Thank you, Juan, for joining the list. I am sure you will have some suggestions for popularising Free Software in this country. Free Software is not doing all that great in India, though there is some progress in parts of the country, and Kerala is one of them. But still there is much to be done. As you must have seen from the discussion here recently, we are trying to see how the Higher Secondary (classes 11 and 12) syllabus can be rid of proprietary software. And then we need to push Free Software into engineering and other courses.
I want also to understand more the role of FSF-India in this topics. In South-America and in Europe we don't have good experiences with "our" FSFs, (considering we have them... :)
Being a part of FSF India, I wouldn't attempt to judge our activities. But I will just mention two important areas where our efforts have succeeded, of course with help from many others. These are 1) preventing the introduction of software patents and 2) getting India to vote against Microsoft's attempt to get its OOXML format accepted as an ISO standard. I am sure that you will soon learn more from the discussions here.
A suggestion: Will be interesting to have part of the FSF-India web-site dedicated to education deeply, with wiki and also a very extensive list of softwares for education. There are lots.
I think this would be a good idea. Let me see what the other members of the Board say.
Regards