On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear all, > > I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent > some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages > and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts > and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support > / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives > India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public" > > From what I gather, the PC magazines of the mid-90s were critical in > getting FOSS (via Linux) in India and there were a few mailing lists that > cropped up in the late 90s (the earliest archives I found are from 98. This > list itself was formed in 2001). I guess there were some fights about > naming (who owns ILUG v/s Bharat LUG etc) and the mailing lists were mostly > about sharing tips regarding installation, drivers and networking > troubleshooting. > There were plenty of workshops, especially at engineering institutes. That is where the real promotion happened. There were interventions against software patents, which resulted in the introduction of an additional line in the law that stopped software patents per se. This block was sought to be bypassed by massaged interpretations of the law by the Indian Patent Office via a patents manual meant to aid indian innovators.Huge number of protests, including meetings at various cities, with the Director of the Indian patent office, finally managed to stave off such dangers. There were interventions against mangling of standards by M$ who used despicable mudslinging tactics to get their filthy slime passed off as standards. The IIT Bom took on the challenge of documenting the innumerable contradictions and missing parts. In return the M$ India head clown labelled Prof. Phatak as biased. -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
