Last weekend, I missed the chance of reminiscing about old times and Goanet. This was because of a visit to New Delhi just then, spending two days marooned at the guest house and spacious campus of the IIT. There was more-than-full access to all that highly-subsidised food that goes into building our elite team of technologists in these parts of the world; but there was virtually no access to email for almost two entire days.
Felt like kicking myself hard not making a decision fast enough, over that Reliance datacard [0]. It now costs less than five thousand rupees (just a wee bit less, Reliance style, it's actually priced at Rs 4990). This datacard allows you to access the Net via a laptop from almost any part of India. No worrying about ISPs (internet service providers) or changing all those complex settings to get online again. And rates are affordable too. Rs 1500 pm unlimited access to cyberspace. Speeds are said to be fast too, one is told, both on this service and on others like Airtel (a bit more costlier; they're offering Blackberry in India too, but at quite a stiff price). If you don't want an unlimited Reliance account, Rs 400 pm will get you free 10 pm to 6 am surfing, and the rest of the day at 30 paise a minute. Little higher than what a fast cybercafe charges, with the bonus of mobility. Across India (minus remote areas, I guess). [And no, this isn't an ad for Reliance... I agree with Samir's criticism of their corporate ethic. This is not a company I admire.] In Delhi, the highlight of the trip was the priviledge of shaking hands with Jimmy Wales (40), the founder of the Wikipedia. Just before he rushed off to speak, I asked him [2] how one brought together scattered bits of information in one place, on the Wikipedia. "Yes, a portal would work," he shot-back. And, like true leaders, he was honest and encouraging at the same time, "You ... just do it.... I don't know how it's done myself," he added, with a mischevious smile. At the same conference [3], there was another of the persons whose work I had been an admirer of for long. For more about Eben Moglen [4] see the Wikipedia... definitions going around in circles, eh? Like the other Jewish leaders whose ideas and work (and sometimes, flesh and bones) one encountered -- Free Software Foundation leader Richard M Stallman, Karl Marx and Jesus Christ -- Moglen too came across as very millenarian in perspective. If Christ's belief in the inevitablity of changing the status quo actually brought about a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately contributed in the collapse of the Roman Empire, Marx too envisioned the inevitability of the Revolution. Never mind that he got it wrong about where it would break out (the affluent world would have nothing to do with it, and have, ever since Marx's warnings at least, been too well taken care of to think revolt.) In turn, Stallman's own heroic work is making the global Free Software movement a reality is clearly spurred on by his view of proprietorial software being sinful, not just extortionately expensive and inconvenient. Then, there is Moglen's confidence that the proprietorial software model simply cannot last. Doubting Thomases like me can never be sure. But, at the end of the day, when the history of computing gets adequately and fully written, we'll anyway all be very grateful that a few emails actually brought down someone like Richard Stallman to Goa, and Farmagudi earlier in this decade. This happened at a time when everyone was forgetting RMS, the "Linux" and "Open Source" movement were overpowering "GNU" and "Free Software", and the media obsfucation of the debate and its origins were almost wholly complete. Moglen's own confidence in the victory of Free Software brought out a few unsupressable smiles from my Indian-born Chinese-descent lawyer-friend Lawrence Liang and myself. But we were all in awe of the fluency with which he spoke about issues involved (the dangers of software patents, why anything worth copying is worth sharing, the creation of Copyleft and more). "He's been part of the movements which created these ideas," said another friend. That probably explained why he could speak so fast, and so fluently, almost as if he was playing a recording... having me struggling to take down notes for a change! It was a great learning experience. Jimmy Wales had some inspiration for me personally on how not-for-profit initiatives (though he runs for-profit ones too) in cyberspace can be run. And how important it is to actually get the fundamentals right. More than enough food for thought.... including discovering that he ran a site offering "adult" services in the past ;-) Moglen -- a former software hacker at the age of 13 turned professor of law and history of law at Columbia University who now serves pro bono as General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and is the Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center -- kept mentioning the need for "having fun" while creating software. Maybe we journos should equally think of enjoying our supposed-to-be-creative work. It was also nice to meet very briefly with Mishi Choudhary, a young lawyer who had emailed me a few times in the past. When she had said she planned to bring Eben Moglen down to India, I didn't quite believe her (but then, never let anyone know of your doubts... you never know when they pull off something *you* thought impossible). Not just that, she actually went ahead to found the India branch of the Software Freedom Law Centre. (This is a network to bail out guys who try to create quality software and then run into trouble with the law or with arm-twisting ega-corporations. See what another youngster from the Free Software movement in India, Anand Babu, now in the US, achieved in the Fairplay case [6] The PlayFair project enabled people to play their purchased iTunes tracks on "non-Apple authorised hardware, provided an authorised key is available".). While in Delhi, Osama Manzar handed over a copy of the book offering links to prize-winners of the Manthan Awards, for e-content in India. Many innovative ventures there. Not surprisingly, Goa didn't even get a single mention; not even a nomination! Which made me thing: we probably have a long, long way to go ... still. . --FN [0] http://wapurl.co.uk/?QIGZLVR [1] http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2006/100806-india-ip.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales [3] http://www.in.redhat.com/news/article/80.html [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales [6] http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/8675/print -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org 9822122436 +91-832-240-9490 http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
