What I was thinking is that if we had some sort of user feedback on various softwares of a certain class/type and that experential knowledge could be put in a sort of ever evolving wiki --(which is kept short and sweet and can be easily grasped by others). We don't have to think of a flame wars though they will inevitably happen but we could think in terms of avoiding flame wars by talking about features etc analytically --it may be an exercise in self restraint and not getting provoked and some neuro linguistic programming but it can be done. The problem is we have to start somewhere and not give up just because its too difficult. (if we haven't tried even, then we have lost the battle at the conception stage itself ;)) Rating features do not need to be hard and fast. They could be wrongly thought about initially but could be corrected over time. i would give importance to the following features/characteristics of a product 1 how good does the development and documentation team look? 2 how long has the product's user's community been active? 3 what are the key strengths of the product's community? can this be gauged from the website 4 what is the communication/collaboration strength of the community? product itself 1 what features does it have that others also have 2 what features are special or exclusive? 3 how buggy is the product? which key bugs need to be sorted out before significant adoption by newcomers happen? 4 how fast are important bugs removed? how fast are important features added? 5 how long ago have they started developing? 6 how is the user interface experience? 7 how is the documentation and mailing list help? 8 do they have plans for a CRM sort of bug list (--e.g. openoffice problems are got back to very fast-- within a day or so) where people's concerns are replied to, reasonably soon 9 is there a distinct seperation between developers and a user support team (help and customer support functions, documentation function, handholding/troubleshooting functions) 10 are the developers good communicators or do they get bugged by newbie talk? and so on and so forth. These are just ideas at this point in time and maybe some others like pcquest magazine etc have already started doing such reviews but for superficial categories of products. We could influence them to talk about more relevant product categories but pcquest also has a drawback that their survey process is market driven. We need to list websites which help do surveys such as surveymonkey.com or formsite.com etc etc. i don't know of any open source software sites which do surveys and allow transparency in the result formation process. Maybe at the end of the day -- we will have to show how to do all this rather than just talk. AND THIS is a BIG Project of impartially evaluating and continuously improving our methodologies of rating KEY open source application softwares. Kush PS: I won't be able to respond so much in the coming days but this idea will remain in the back of my mind and someday may start as a sustainable activity unless somebody else beats us to it ;). Will keep reading the responses and may reply once in a while. Thanks for your inputs. Ramakrishna Reddy wrote:

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: I can't say whether FSF should or should not rate the application development softwares or application softwares (i have no idea of the swot of fsfindia or knowledge beyond its mission statement) but somebody will have to do this job as it is very important to increase the spread of knowhow on whats good and whats available in open source. Open source software adoption can't really take off without proper knowledge in India and it seems that we at fsfindia are either developers or geeks or following agendas set by others outside India and our main focus is only on a few areas such as localisation of fonts, scripts etc without understanding the economics and the problems of an average user we are now targeting. We need to think of IT as an enabling tool but which is constrained by a few things in India's interior (the first is lack of reliable electricity, the 2nd is cost of the hardware/software and the most important is the knowledge and training on using the software with a lowered cost to benefit ratio). We need more forums like epinions.com linuxquestions.org and reduction in the amount of duplicate knowledge available from so many sources. I for one, only came to know about other possible solutions for enabling libraries thru Frederick Noronha mentioning koha first and then in a subsequent mail open source softwares such as emilda.org, phpmylibrary, olibrary, elibrary etc. We sorely lack access to good libraries (and good books) as a critical part of our infrastructure to propel our HUGE population into the knowledge age --the west has a huge collection of public and private libraries and other ways of interacting and gathering knowledge(community and recreation centres) but in India, public libraries are totally in the hands of unaccountable govt agencies and not under public minded private trusts etc, relatively speaking. Nobody compares/considers the impact of declining access to libraries on our ability to become a developed nation --eg in the planning commission's budgeting process papers etc. Our intelligentsia looks upto the american consulate library or british council libraries for the latest and the best information and therefore we see good things happenning only in the west and merely copy them - -here i am talking about the general populations' access to libraries and not those who are in good private companies or renowned institutions like the IITs, IIMs, etc. Even access to patent databases is easier via the internet to sources outside India. I was looking at the prime minister's office in Iceland's website and they said(in a pdf file) that ICELANd is at the forefront of technology adoption in the developed world, relatively speaking. What is most interesting is that tiny country has made use of some form of groupware application which is used *thruout *its govt machinery to give a uniform interface and this sort of thing is needed for duplication here in India to reduce size of organisations and make them competitive. But we do not build on other's mistakes/lessons to form a paperless office -- our vendors still hype about applications like openoffice (which is propreitary to sun/java )whereas we now need things like egroupware or jboss enabled open source document management systems which allow collaboration and monitoring so that our private enterprises can more easily network with each other. I don't think egovernance is possible in India at present given the lack of political will to re-engineer a bloated mega monster but surely our budding small businesses and small organisations/entrepreneurs can create a super world shattering effect if they could properly network and work as rapidly changing teams thru open source tools. We need a site to counter the effects of sites like techsoup.org etc made by microsoft and others to push their technology Kush

Krishna Pagadala wrote: I beg to differ. There are other innovative ways to spread knowledge in cases where electrical power and hardware cost/access is a problem. Books, magazines and newspapers are the cheapest sources of knowledge still and many people have tried many ideas to have books spread around. Wikipedia is a very good solution to broaden the horizon and collaborate on systematising knowledge. We have to keep an open mind and try various approaches to make libraries viable/ possible. I know of a few innovative approaches and there may be thousands of others. (such as 1 --discounted books bookpool.com(50% costs for latest computer books --doesn't work in India though because of customs/bureaucracy) or 2 --collaborative ventures of an Indian publisher with Oreilly in Bombay which has reduced costs of latest technical books drastically, 3--bookcrossing.com (sharing books), 4--article in the bbc which mentioned revolving libraries at street corners --leave a book at designated street corners and people will read them and return them back to those places --experiment very very successful in beijing or shanghai or some chinese city (no fixed cost for hiring large buildings for libraries), 5--mobile libraries, 6--library networks etc etc) Cost is not a constraint to an innovative mind (as the saying goes --where there is a will, there is a way). There are analogies to the free software world too --we have quite a lot of ebooks which can be copied onto CDs/DVDs for increasing penetration and knowledge (producingoss.com pragmaticprogrammer.com (ruby version 1) cathedral and the bazaar, unix programming culture, hacker folklore, etc etc) but I don't think anybody has tried to list so many titles and give away documentation etc the way gutenberg.net is doing from a one stop platform or website, in India, either on a state level or a national/regional level. The opencd.org ultimatebootcd.com etc are not known as much as they could be known. Magazines spread a lot of CDs but ultimately they end up as plastic junk --time some innovation was made in reducing the plastic waste by making the CDs recyclable/reusable. Kush

I am not sure about other states, but in Kerala school text books cost very little Rs 5-20. If this is different in other parts of India it is a serious issue to be taken up. regards arun

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: I would not like to contest the oxymoronic nature of the phrase "agendas set by others" --you are right about this observation. This is loose talk, in a way. In the end, all work is influenced by somebody else. I was referring to cost to benefit ratio of going the IT way FOR most of the INDIAN population as a panacea to all ills. An assumption is made that localised IT tools will help India improve much more than now but the assumption also must consider that far greater things have to happen in the environment side by side for this to succeed. some examples are 1 people have to learn to read and write (for those in the community who are illiterate unless we are thinking of only targeting those who can read and write CLEARLY at present) 2 there have to be common and standardised applications to increase the familarity and usage of IT products as a way of life--graded learning processes/stages have to be thought about. 3 people have to be shown success stories on how IT products changed their lifestyles and this has to be made part of the neighbourhood talk scene 4 electricity has to become regular or workarounds found such as cheaper laptops,ups,batteries, solar chargers etc in the neglected geographical areas 5 sometimes bread and butter issues are far more important than IT products. 6 IT will work on a mass scale only when our governance/politics is re-engineered. Otherwise the benefits will be for a few people only. The rest will continue to struggle. 7 in some cases better and cheaper options exist for networking (such as cultural practices, ways and means etc) and in others IT is far ahead. People cannot jump on the IT bandwagon blindly without analysing pros and cons. 8 cheaper technological innovations such as wireless networking, community wireless etc have to be jump started by increasing number of tech savvy entrepreneurs to increase the competition and thus fuel greater adoption of IT My thoughts are getting jumbled up at this stage. Maybe I need to take a break. yes and this could be an area (documentation building) which may bring more people into the open source/free software fold in India Thanks for the info. It will certainly help. Yes there are too many thoughts. No, but will have a look. Thanks Kush

??????? ? (Praveen A) wrote: Superb! Awesome! Thanks, Praveen! Kush