Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
--- On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com
wrote:
| It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. --
Again, I can't speak for Atul Chitnis, but, I feel you need to come away from idol worship.
Yes, there isn't any one person who is responsible to popularize F/OSS
in India.
I think you missed the operating word “more” responsible. If distributing a million Linux CDs in tech-averse India is not a major achievement then I don’t know what is. I know people will say he and CyberMedia made money out of it but the end result was that he did reach a lot of people. The word that comes to mind, (sorry for the movie reference) is “Chutzpah” - "I distributed a million Linux CDs in India and even got paid for it."
I am not sure about idol worship - I am pretty much an outsider and have never met Chitnis or attended his events. I am forming opinions on what I have seen online.
The only other person who comes close (from what I gather publicly) is probably Satish Babu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu) - unfortunately he does not blog so I have no idea what drives him / his contributions and if he is really responsible for State of Kerala being such an active implementer of FOSS.
Would love to know if there are such people!
| What is the state of FOSS activism / evangelism in India today? --
There are people and communities that cater for both local needs, and at the national level. Some call it fragmentation, but, cloning is natural in F/OSS communities, and it is important for scalability. There is no one single silver bullet though.
I agree, but also believe that consolidation helps.
Consolidation has no meaning in the FOSS world. And that is it's strength. It makes it hard for moneybags to figure out the beast on one end and allows innumerable individuals and groups to use stuff for their specific needs. Thus, while M$ was staring at their desktop, and Nokia at their phone scree, the entire mobile market whizzed past those two. Additionally the embedded market has left M$ windows CE and other oses like neutrino and qnx in the de
It also depends upon the urgency one feels about the state of affairs and
the crores of public money spent on software licenses.
Nothing to do with software or evangelism. It is merely about the money.
Activism / Evangelism should be multi-pronged and both local and global