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Call to revive `hacker culture'

Staff Reporter

At four-day faculty development workshop

KUTTIPPURAM: The Free Software Foundation started by Richard Stallman is a monumental effort to reinstate the `hacker culture,' said M. Achuthan, former professor of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai.

He was speaking at a four-day faculty development workshop on `Networking with GNU Linux' at the MES College of Engineering here. The workshop was organised by the college's Information Technology Department.

Dr. Achuthan recalled that in the 1950s and Sixties, it was the hacker culture that prevailed in all prominent universities in the U.S.

"Researchers used to come to laboratories and pick up files from the first tray, which usually contained the latest work on software or hardware. After making contributions on this free work, the hacker researcher would leave the most current output in the first tray. The aim of these original hackers was to understand how a device or system works and how to improve it. And the only ethics followed was that the hardware and software of all systems be made freely available to everyone," he said.

The workshop had sessions on system administration, network administration, database administration, network socket programming and server scripting on Debian GNU Linux systems.

The workshop coincided with the Software Freedom Week being celebrated the world over by free software enthusiasts and volunteers.

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