From: V. Sasi Kumar vsasi@cessind.org To: toieditorial@timesgroup.com Cc: sasi.cess@gmail.com Subject: Comments on "No free lunches for me" by Charles Assissi Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:49:27 +0530

Sir,

I was appalled to read the article by Charles Assissi entitled "No free lunches for me" in your newspaper dated August 31, 2006. Although he is perfectly within his rights to express his views, and that is what he has done, when it is published in an influential publication like yours, he should have been more careful in formulating and expressing his opinion, since a lot of people are going to take this seriously. My objections are as follows:

1. He effectively says that nice things should not be done because those who do them are bound to come last. This is shocking, to say the least. In today's world torn by strife and infected by terrorism, I would have thought that what we need is more nice things and nice people. I guess coming first is more important for Mr. Assissi than peace, kindness, empathy and other nice things.

2. He says, "my guess is free software will always remain on the fringes of the mainstream." If he had just bothered to look at some statistics, he would have changed his 'guess'. Just a few examples: The Free Software operating system GNU/Linux is the second most popular on desktops, after Microsoft Windows. Free software applications like Apache are by far the most popular on web servers. Apache, incidentally, has a share of around 65%. A number of companies, including large multinationals, are switching to Free Software for their network applications and even desktops. The city of Munich has shifted all their 13,000 or so computers to Free Software with help from IBM.

3. He says that the spread of Free Software would deny jobs to programmers. He would have found, if he had done some homework, that a vast majority of programmers are involved in developing or customising software for specific needs for specific clients. Interestingly, many of them do use Free Software. The fraction of programmers involved in developing the kind of software people use on their desktops is very small. And even in the Free Software world, there are companies like Red Hat, Mandriva, Novell, IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems, who employ programmers to develop Free Software.

4. He compares his profession with software development. Though the final products (article and source code) are comparable, the work is not at all. Once he publishes an article (like the one under mention here), that is the end of it. He, or anyone else, is never going to improve it or do anything else with it. No one is going to use if for any purpose. Once it is read, and people like us write our responses, its purpose is over. Software, obviously, is nothing like that at all. If Mr. Assissi had spent a few minutes thinking about this issue, he would have realised this fact.

Gandhiji once said, "They first ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then we win." People like Mr. Assissi are still at the second stage -- laughing at Free Software. Proprietary software companies like Microsoft have started fighting Free Software with whatever means they have. History shows that they have little chance of winning.

Best