On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@au-kbc.org wrote:
On Tuesday 03 March 2009 17:51:55 Venkatesh Hariharan wrote:
D'Souza, Satyakam Goswami, Mahesh Pai, Lawrence Gonsalves and Rony for their suggestions/expert comments).
who is Lawrence Gonsalves?
Oops! Kenneth Gonsalves! Sorry about that!
I suggest that we put this up on a wiki and get FOSS supporters across the country to sign this. The more the number of signatures, the more seriously political parties will take this initiative.
all parties have spam filters in place. None of them take signature campaigns seriously. If we are to be taken seriously, we need to lobby. Arrange meets with political leaders.
In a democracy, how else do we indicate public support for an idea? We have plenty of supporters inside political parties and anything that indicates popular support for free/open source will strengthen their hands. Currently, IT is one among hundreds of issues that the political leadership deals with. If there is public support for FOSS adoption, it builds pressure on them to do something about it. Other channels must also be explored, but signing this manifesto is something tangible that the LUGs can do right now. Once this is done, we can also take it to the education ministry, state governments etc.
Venky
Venky