On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
Wrote a small writeup after attending the RMS talk last week:
https://www.erpnext.com/free-or-open-source-software
Last week, we attended a talk by Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software. He is legendary in tech circles for founding the GNU Project (GNU is Not Unix) and writing a lot of tools that are a part of the Linux Operating System, which according to him, must be called GNU/Linux. Stallman is also known to have radical political views on software and has a set of terminology that he insists must be used by everyone talking about his work. His primary disagreement is with the term Open Source, which he calls as pushovers. By pushovers, he means that the term Open Source software is tainted by the need for sustainability using commercial means. Often this is unfairly done either by only distributing parts of the software as free or by keeping some features as paid.
The term is also misused by numerous companies who open the code solely for purposes of audit to paying customers who can demand such code audits. Microsoft being a prime example.
For Stallman, all software must be free and must be used in ways that all derivate works also have the same freedom. The thought is both noble and also a protection that companies do not pick up work from the community and bundle it as their own tools. The GNU General Public License, also called as the "copyleft" license, protects these rights. ERPNext too is licensed under this License, even though we position ERPNext as Open Source.
Personally I am more pragmatic about the usage of the terminology. We use Open Source because our users understand this term more than Free. Also Free ERP has different connotations. Free stuff is eyed suspiciously as most people believe that there is a cost to everything. This is tragic because a lot of good free and open source software exists, and it is sad to see that because of such political issues, groups cannot get together to promote it. (I will use these terms interchangeably in this post.)
The limitations of english language was touched on by RMS, you could easily position your stuff as Swatantra (?). And not merely avoid controversy, but also help spread correct awareness.
Stallman also talked a lot about surveillance and how governments are using devices to illegally and surreptitiously capture information of our likes, relations and movements. Even though we all need to caution against too much intrusion of privacy, these devices also bring a lot of convenience and freedom to us.
*Advocacy*
One of the primary roles that Stallman and his Free Software Foundation (FSF) plays is that of advocating Free Software in education institutes and governments. Teaching Free Software to students is of vital importance because if they start getting familiar with free software, they will grow up to use it. Companies like Microsoft send sales people to promote their software to schools because they want to get young students to user their tools and grow familiar with them. In the same way, promoters of free software must also send volunteers to schools to promote free software.
It is very sad to see that the few people who are promoting free software are also tired and depressed.
Dunno where you jumped to that conclusion.
Clearly new energy is required on these fronts. We at Web Notes feel very strongly about this and we hope to make some contribution here. Unfortunately we are also stuck with a couple of constraints. One is of course that we are need to get our revenues in place first and second is that we don't know where to start. Maybe a fresh beginning is required.
*What Can We Do*
Our first goal, like I said earlier is that we need to ensure we have surplus funds to invest in this area. ERPNext is surely growing very well and revenue is also increasing year on year, but it is still not enough. If we divert attention in too many things, then we may lose the advantage that ERPNext has built up. Also, there is a lot to be done.
Business development is part of a business. Every state government spends tens crores on education. The smartness is in campaigning for FOSS with ones business goals in mind.
If you take funding from let's say the FSF, it would be wholly unprincipled to project your company / services in such programs, unless you too were contributing financially.
This would be ideally done under the umbrella of Free Software Foundation of India (or if they are very religious/suspicious about us who have to earn our bread and don't live off grants, or there are too many ego-mountains to be climbed, then we could form a new group).
That one is a Pointless rant. Afaik, Nobody on this list is living off someone else's largesse.