I was recently talking to a friend who told me how even though the idea of Free Software is very radical, it has not been able to translate to social changes on the ground and hence cant be called as a revolution in itself. Free Software has led to completely new ideas of producing and distributing software which has again probably also led to a complete different dimension to sharing knowledge like through Wikipedia, sharing digital media like through Creative Commons license and something which is becoming very popular now, the idea of open hardware. There is also now this whole idea of community over Internet which has brought people together for very specific issues. Starting from Anonymous, to Wikileaks to Arab springs, all these are ideas where people came together with the idea of community over the Internet and then doing some changes on the ground on actual real social issues.
The latest news of recently appointed Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich stepping down as he did not necessarily agree with homosexuality and had donated to support an anti-gay proposition is a very important development in free software evolution. The outrage it created within the mozilla community which actually led to this development is quite interesting. This states that Mozilla as one of the leading free software foundation has committed not only to equality in web and with respect to software but also equality amongst the people in real world. As a foundation mainly dealing with software and web, it has now stood for something that is involved in a social context of real world outside the realm of binary digits. This is important as it asserts the fact that freedom that we talk about in software also is equally important in real life if not much more important. Free Software, free Internet as an area of achieving freedom cannot be complete without changing things in actual society where people respect freedom of individuals in the society.
This also asserts a very different perspective of the community as a whole. Though in real world, opposition to gay marriages is very active and common, though the whole process of democracy in real world has not been able to change this in the actual society, in the virtual world, where the community is much more democratic it was able to change things for real. It leads interestingly to the idea that the real big world is not democratic enough or the virtual small world is very radical as against the actual real world. The voice of homosexual people which was not heard in real world was actually heard and echoed by the community in virtual world.
Ofcourse how this development will manifest itself in the real world inside the mozilla community, and also in other free software communities is up to be seen. Can it backfire on mozilla community where the real unequal society takes over and abandons mozilla for coming out of its stated realm of binary digits and taking part in real world issues? Will it alienate people, both users and developers who could appreciate the freedom in virtual world but cannot come to terms of such a freedom in real life?
Tag: FOSS
April 4, 2014
December 4, 2013
Big Democracy : Big Surveillance talk by Maria Xynou
I attended this talk today at CIS-India office. Maria as part of her research was able to point out very well on how the Indian government is investing heavily in various kinds of surveillance and how all of this is getting centralized under one big umbrella project called ICMS(Indian Central Monitoring System). This along with the UID project is going to be totally catastrophic with respect to an individual’s privacy in our country. We already know with SnoopGate case at Gujarat how privacy of individuals are easily violated for petty reasons and how the whole state machinery is put in use without any checks and balances just on the will of few people at the top of the state machinery.
The talk also covered part of her research where she went through different private companies who have developed various products specializing in mass and targetted surveillance through Telecommunication, Internet and biometric data. What is scary is that the customers of majority of these companies are Law Enforcement Agencies(LEAs) and Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers which they actively brag about on their websites. Moreover, most of these companies are not even ISO:27001 complaint and hardly any of them follow any privacy policies.
Hence Surveillance is becoming a big profitable industry in india where most of the profits are coming from tax payers money.
I will be sharing the link to the recorded video of the talk which will definitely give you a much detailed idea of the various surveillance projects run by Indian government and various companies involved sharing the profit and benefitting from the same.
In the blog, I would like to mention two issues that mainly stuck me during the discussion after the talk.
1) Privacy of meta data is equally important if not more than the actual content data.
One of the most common excuse that we heard from various NSA agencies after the Snowden leaks were that they are mainly storing the MetaData and not the content data in itself and hence it is not as bad as it seems. However Maria during the discussion pointed out very well why we should be more concerned if this is actually the case. Content data may not always be true. Many times it can just be garbage information or totally false information being exchanged between people. Also just due to its enormity, it becomes very difficult to actually do data mining on the content data itself. However MetaData in itself is true and cannot be contested upon. Suppose you sent an email from a particular location to your friend, the content in the data itself can be false and can be something which is not much useful. However the very fact that you were at a particular location and used a particular IP Address and communicated to a particular person with a specific email ID itself cannot be contested and this metadata of your converstaion can be used against you. This gets worse as these metadata over a period of time can draw a picture of you which is completely different than your actual personality but since the information in metadata cannot be contested, it becomes very difficult to prove otherwise.
2) Privacy awareness an cultural issue in India
Often whenever we try to create awareness about the growing surveillance in India and across the world, there is a complete indifference amongst people about it. ‘Why should I worry when I have nothing to hide’ and ‘It is for our own safety’ are the most common reply. Maria attributed two main reasons behind this lack of concern with respect to privacy amongst people.
a) Asian culture is more collective and less of individualistic as compared to western culture. Privacy in itself is a very individualistic right and since the asian cultures are more about the society in general than individuals, we are often happy to give up our privacy for better of the society.
b) Since large part of the society in India still depends in various aspects on government support, they are ok to let government have a kind of parental surveillance over their privacy. However the fact that such a surveillance leads to control over the people is mainly ignored or unknown to people. One of the biggest reason given behind UID/Aadhar Project is that since there are so many different projects of the government, there needs to be some kind of centralized system which will ensure that the support from government reaches the right people. However with no one way of currently identifying people, there is lot of leakages in the projects and hence unique identification method will help. People have actually bought this argument for the project and have enrolled enthusiastically. However the implications of such a huge database of all the people across the country will only be known in time. We know how such databases of people were used in Germany under a dictatorial regime. There is also some information of how Voter’s list were used during the 1984 and 2002 riots to identify people.
Over all the picture of surveillance in India is very grim. Another point what Maria pointed out is that though surveillance in itself is very scary, what examplifies it is the acceptance of it by people as a normal state affiar. In a dictatorial authoratative regime, surveillance would have been contested as something being pushed from the top and hence infringing people’s right. However what we now see is that most successful surveillance states are some of the biggest democratic societies.
November 12, 2013
ByteStruck, a wonderfully organized Free Software event
ByteStruck is an event conducted by PACE LUG Mangalore for the high school and pre university students. Being conducted for last 6 years, it has been able to attract the best of the students from in and around Mangalore and now the schools are competing with each other to prepare their students and win ByteStruck.
The philosophy of ByteStruck is to introduce students at a very young age to programming and Free Software ideology. On these lines, a competition using any basic programming language or prototyping environment like Scratch or Alice is used. Students are given a theme on the spot of competition and using the free software tool are supposed to present their ideas. Teams of two students compete against each other in two categories, one for high school students and another for pre-university students.
The event attracts school students to the campus of PACE College and this way, college is able to show case their infrastructure and facilities to the students and there by encouraging students to choose the college if they decide to do engineering. Schools and pre-university colleges are happy to compete against each other and show case the competency of students. Students themselves see the event as something different than the other competitions that they usually participate and hence are thrilled to come and take part in the competition. Thus in a beautiful culmination of interests of all the different parties involved in organizing the event, the PACE Linux User’s Group is able to spread the message of free software and encourage students to learn different aspects of computer programming at a very young age.
On the organizing part, the event involves hard work of hundreds of volunteers involved in various aspects of the event. Once the free software tool which will be used for the competition is finalized, some volunteers are involved in the preparing and collecting learning material for the students. This year Scratch and Alice were selected as the tools for competition for high school and pre-university students respectively. All this material is then packed into a CD/DVD and then hundreds of such CD/DVDs are written to be distributed to various schools. The volunteers this year visited close to 150 schools in and around Mangalore region and as far as schools in Kasaragod. This is one of the major activity involved in the organizing of the event and it is overwhelmingly supported by all the students of all semester of CSE/IS department in the college. Each school interested in participating in the event have to assign a school teacher as a guide for the students and the teacher is responsible for all the coordination with the participants along with registration and transportation activity. Registrations can be done usually over phone but this year, even online registrations were accepted on their website http://bytestruck.in Each school is allowed to send maximum of 5 teams for each category. Around 100 teams for high school category and 50 teams for pre-university students registered this year.
On the big day of ByteStruck, the transportation department of the organizers starts picking students from various pick up points around the city using the College Buses. The college itself being in the outskirts of the city, providing transportation helps the participants and also ensures that the students can reach the campus on time. A school teacher is expected to accompany students which helps in ensuring discipline amongst the participants. Once in campus, participants are expected to confirm their registrations at the registration desk and then served breakfast.
The teams are then sent to different labs. Due to the great response this year, 6 college labs had to be prepared for the event, 4 for high school students with all the systems having Scratch installed in them and 2 labs for pre-university students with Alice installed in all the computers. Unfortunately the platform used for organizing the event is currently Windows as the organizers did not get permission to install any GNU/Linux based distribution in some of the labs. Thus to maintain uniformity, the organizers decided to run the competition with Windows as the platform. Once assembled in the labs, students are given a theme for each category and in next two hours they are expected to come up with prototypes representing the themes using the free software tool. This year themes were “Newton’s Third Law” and “Two friends stuck in an island” for high school and pre-university students respectively. Once the stipulated time for the competition is over, judges go to each team judging on various factors on how well the prototypes matched the given theme and how well the same was presented.
Lunch is then served to participants while the judges and organizers finalize the results. Since many students come from far off schools early in the morning, it is important to provide lunch to all the participants as many of them wouldn’t get a chance to bring their lunch boxes. After Lunch, one hour of discussion on one or two free software topics beneficial to the students is planned. This year, Wikipedia and Stellarium were the two topics.
This is then followed by closing ceremony where the eagerly awaited results are announced. Apart from top 3 teams in each category, the best guide school teacher in each category is also recognized.
Over all, ByteStruck is one of its kind FOSS event organized across the country. It is able to attract best of the students in the region, get very good support from the college authorities and most importantly a very dedicated and passionate team to organize.
For more info on ByteStruck – http://bytestruck.in
June 4, 2011
ilug-bengaluru meetup
On 28th May, I attended Ilug-Bengaluru meeting. Deependra had called for the meetup and he had asked if FSMK office could be used as the venue. Since there was no other event planned in the office at the time, we were glad to provide the venue. Since the event clashed with the samudaya campaign event, only me and Prabodh sir from FSMK could attend the meetup. We were joined by Hobbes, Deependra and Harish from the ilug-Bengaluru. From FSMK’s side, we informed about the different events that we were conducting in the colleges, especially the success we had in St. Joseph with a course on free software technology.
Later, the discussion turned towards the importance of having a noname.conf again this year considering the success it had last year. Last year, the conference had got around 50 attendees and it had diverse topics for discussions ranging from startups to localization to discussion about various distributions. It also featured the screening of the Blender movie, Sintel.
Clearly, for a city like Bengaluru, which has been hosting almost all the major conferences in FOSS domain, like, National conference on Free software by FSMK, Pycon in MSRIT, FOSS.IN in Nimhans Convention Centre, GNOME Asia in Dayanand College, KDE conf in RVCE, Ubuntu Developer Day by Canonical, there is a need to organize regular meetups to keep the people connected apart from just during the events.
Hobbes proposed to conduct second noname.conf on August 27th, which is considered as the anniversary week for Linux. The plan is to target around 150-200 participants during the noname.conf. Like last year, noname.conf will be open to anybody and everybody to come and discuss anything associated with FOSS technology.
The noname.conf will then be followed by a major FOSS conference in Novemeber which will target audience and speakers from all over India.
For such a plan to get implemented, it is necessary that before noname.conf, FOSS evangelists regularly meet. Hobbes gave the example of meetups in 2003 which managed to get around 50 participants every meetup. Clearly if in past when there was little awareness of GNU/Linux amongst people, if the meetups managed to get an attendance of 50 people every single time, managing the same at present time shouldnt be a difficult task. The only bottleneck we identified was the current split in the community in Bangalore. The split makes sense as each group have their own way of seeing FOSS technology and its impact. However we also need to make sure that the split does not inhibit new comers to join. Currently there is a lack for a local platform for new comers to come and learn the technology. Even though the groups are individually trying to make such platforms, if we get together, the impact will much more profound.
Hence we call upon members of all the groups which share the idea of spreading and using FOSS at all levels to join us during our meetups. The meetup is planned to be conducted on every last weekend of the month. The venue and the exact date and time will be broadcasted in all mailing lists as soon as they are fixed. We hope to see active participation from all FOSS enthusiasts and veterans.
December 27, 2010
Why does FOSS matter to me so much?
Lately after I have become a part of a new team, as usual I have been very expressive about my affinity towards FOSS. And again as always, I end up arguing the pros of FOSS in all aspects of software. However, sometimes I am forced to think why exactly does FOSS matter to me, personally. I am usually a follower just because I find someone else doing it and feel that even I should do it. This has been the case with most of my hobbies like Coin and stamp collection. Probably my likeness towards FOSS was also due to that. My first 5 semesters in college was always spent playing AOE or watching movies. However with the start of sixth semester, I started getting conscious about campus placements. As one of my close friend was deep into FOSS, it was very easy for me to enter FOSS world with his help, especially with 24 hours internet available. After entering into the world of linux, what attracted me most was the adventurous ride of trying out different things with being skeptical of Virus or formatting. Since everything was available online, I was able to try many different things. I kept trying different linux based distributions, different replacements of popular softwares used in Windows and trying to convince others to use the same. I remember me having to beg my friends to give me their laptops to play AOE as I didnt have Windows installed in mine. I also tried various ways to run AOE and other popular games on linux. However due to lack of dedication and discipline, I never came out with any thing productive or any contribution to FOSS. So while leaving college all I had learnt was to debug various simple problems in linux and chatting and talking to people on IRC and mailing lists.
After college, I joined a company completely dedicated to philosophy of FOSS and again my adventure of trying out many things for one particular problem continued. I was also close to making some meaningful contribution but then again I had to leave it in between. However the 8 months spent in the company were very useful to develop my personal skill set. Not only was I able to get a good understanding of PERL, I was able to understand how big softwares are written and how problems in them are debugged. I also wrote few plugins in perl but since I left in between probably they were never included in the main stream project.
At this point of my life, after leaving the company I was in a very bad situation where I had no expertise in any specific domain and was a Jack of all trades. But it was not good enough and I had to struggle for 3 months before I could find a job for myself. The job had nothing to do with FOSS but I had no choice at that moment. But the new job gave me initially lot of time to again install Ubuntu on my (office) laptop and also get good internet connectivity using which I could continue my adventure of swimming in ocean of FOSS world and pick small fishes whenever possible. Along with the new job, I got engaged with a parallel activity of volunteering at FSMK. This was very important for me as this was the only means for me to connected to actual people contributing to FOSS. It also provided me very specific examples of how FOSS has helped change lives of so many people. This gave me the oxygen which I needed to keep swimming in the FOSS world. It also gave me an immense confidence of propagating FOSS to other people. Till I got connected to FSMK, I was propagating FOSS more because I used it and It made more sense then Windows as the options and features as a desktop OS were so much. However after getting into FSMK, I was able to see the real impact of FOSS philosophy. Seeing slum children use FOSS to nurture their creativity, watching blind people use FOSS to interact more easily with other world and compete with normal world. All this would never have been possible if FOSS was not there. And that is the real reason why I promote FOSS. I am not bothered with my freedom and my right to view the source code. But I want to make sure that everyone in the world gets a chance to showcase his creativity, improve his lifestyle and grow in his career. This can only be done with FOSS. All the proprietary companies can come up with massive plans of donating computer hardware and softwares free of cost just so that they can show it as their Corporate responsibility but none of these companies are going to cut their profits so that they can make any real difference to people’s lives. And this is why FOSS is the messiah of the world of economically challenged and differently enabled people.
However the Mahabharat has just begun and probably this is the toughest time for FOSS. Because most of the developers of FOSS have become complacent towards the actual reason of existence of FOSS. FOSS is becoming more and more volunteering than a necessity and this might lead to its end. As there is a very strong force of profit and capitalism driving proprietary softwares but FOSS is driven only due to their philosophy. If the philosophy is compromised, then it will only be a matter of time before proprietary companies gulp the FOSS world. We are already seeing many FOSS companies getting acquired. Let us see what 2011 has in store for the FOSS world.
October 24, 2010
Image for ILU
Please check this image and see if it suits ILU.
I have modified it from the original image which I found here, http://www.jamesward.com/2009/11/25/flex-builder-on-linux-update/
Hence I dont know if I am actually allowed to modify and use that image. If there are any copyright issues, I will be glad to remove this image from here.
Created for ILU(With Shadow)
Image for ILU (Without Shadow)
September 12, 2009
my grievance at pgportal.gov.in
Courtesy: Debayan-It was actually his idea as to why Governments should waste so much of money for softwares which is required by each state.
Pooja-She introduced me to this portal.
I have registered my grievance in the Public Grievance Portal successfully and now waiting for their reply and action.
My registration number is MINIT/E/2009/00382
Following is my grievance description:
I feel sorry to see that the hard earned money of people which is collected as income tax by the Central and State Governments and which is also one of the biggest source of revenue is being wasted. Each and every IT Department of all 28 states spend money to build same softwares for their various work. Each state has a Income Tax Department which needs a software to regulate collection of Income Tax. Each state has a Agriculture Department which needs to keep record of all the cultivable land and the different grains being grown there. Each state has a Electricity Department which needs a software to regulate distribution of electricity to different cities and collection of electricity bill in different cities. Each department of the state needs a software to look after their mailing solutions so that each department has its own mail server. Each state has various government schools which all require softwares like operating system, office related softwares and various study softwares for students To sum it all, each of the 28 states of India spends huge money every year to get softwares for each department and maintain these softwares. That means, citizens of India pay 28 times for just one software that is built only once by the software company and resold to every state. This is highly illogical. A simple solution for this is to make all the State Governments to use Free and Open Source Softwares(FOSS). Each government will pay the software companies only to customize the software according to the state needs. This will cost them only 10% of what they are already paying. Since FOSS can be used and customized by any software company this will give a chance for small companies to enter the market and also lead to a very fair competitive market. I hope proper action will be taken to see that such huge amount of money is not wasted and using FOSS becomes compulsory practice in all government institution. Please solve this grievance which is not only mine but also of every Indian citizen as soon as possible.
