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Software sans borders
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A three-day convention called ‘Free Software Free Society’ begins on December 9
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Photo: H. Satish
Pioneer of Free software movement Richard Mathew Stallman
An international conference on free and open software is being held at the Convention Center at Mascot Hotel, on December 9, 10 and 11. Called ‘Free Software Free Society,’ it is organised by the Kerala State IT Mission jointly with the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), and the free software community in Kerala.
Eminent speakers
The conference aims at discussing ‘Freedom in computing, development and culture.’ Eminent speakers of the likes of Richard Mathew Stallman, the pioneer of the free software movement, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Roberto Verzola, a sustainable agriculture campaigner trying to bring together free software and agriculture, will be present.
It was in the 1980s that Richard Stallman came out with the free software movement, when he found that software was becoming a product to be paid for. According to him, software was like knowledge and it had to be shared. It is this principle that the free software community follows today. Free software did not mean software that came free of cost. It was in effect the freedom to use software, the same way there was freedom to exercise speech and expression. It was essentially about copyrighting software, or rather not copyrighting software.
In Kerala, free software community was first restricted to engineering colleges. Slowly it spread to the schools in Kerala.
“Our education system comes with certain values, that knowledge should be free and shared. It is the same principle we use for free software. Using proprietary software is like using a black box; you didn’t know what happened when you used it. This was only an empowerment to consume, not construct,” says Arun M., Special Officer for Free and Open Software, at Kerala State IT Mission. Now, the free software community has spread to colleges and other academic institutions, and online user groups.
In addition, cost and affordability were other factors that are in favour of free software. But society has not yet understood the advantages of free software. That’s what the conference tries to solve: to provide an understanding of the importance of knowledge sharing. “If someone wrote a piece of code that did a certain task, it is unfair that it be withheld from the rest of the world. There may be others who spend days trying to figure out the same, and then there maybe others who could modify it and make it even better,” Arun remarks.
‘Copyleft’
The free software community thus came up with the concept of ‘Copyleft’ by which one person gives a piece of information to another with freedom to use or change it, provided he/she gives the same freedom to others. The conference would discuss the impact of ‘Copyleft’ in different fields including movies and music.
The three-day conference would be attended by a number of people including farmers, Adivasis, the disabled and those with special needs. Interested people can register to attend the function. The number of participants is restricted to 400. Further details are available at the site http://fsfs.in
SITA S
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