On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 9:47 PM, pavithran <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi list , > Both BJP and CPIM who have announced in their manifestos that they would > support Free / Open source software lost Indian Elections 2009 . > The winner , congress is more or less passive towards our community ( even > IT community ) I wonder if the Open Source manifesto alone should be considered when voting a party into power. BJP would surely bring in "faster" progress, but their campaign about Hindutva and extreme right politics leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I would most certainly have loved a better open-source push.
But again in all but a few private engineering colleges, Linux is still projected as UNIX and the command line is the first thing taught. Most still under the assumption that Linux is a primitive OS. In some other colleges (like mine and more so, Jaya) there are a bunch of students who are actively for the F/OSS revolution and I personally have made atleast 10-15 people switch to GNU/Linux and 1 to OpenSolaris. If the educational system includes a F/OSS syllabus, most teachers need to be raised to using F/OSS or atleast a F/OSS advisor who is passionate and actively contributes back like Kenneth/Rahul/Raja/whoever I Left out must mentor the college or a group of colleges. I would love it if someone would actually come out to mine and mentor it. I cannot assure you the number of passionate users at the moment. Some 4-5 whom I "inspired" have just graduated. And I think there might be around 10-20 active users and say 20 more passive (Linux is safer for the internet) kinda users. If the current scenario remains and we have a F/OSS syllabus, students would start looking at F/OSS as primitive and an unnecessary burden in their college bags. > Let's hope projects like NRCFOSS gets support from the appropriate > ministries . I sure hope they do! :D Maybe we can all sign a letter to Dayanidhi (If it hasn't been done yet) about the F/OSS campaign. Possibly even show that it can help cut costs of netbooks which I am sure will be on his manifesto this term --- Ashok `ScriptDevil` Gautham _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
