Cant blindly blame the whole software engg. community in bangalore. There are some diffrent voice also. check out http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug/ http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=13048057 Nivead "Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better " ~Albert Camus
justin joseph <justin_joseph007 at yahoo.com> wrote: Thanks Jay I had taken sometime and commented on Foss.in first day on 29th, resending the same. Sorry if this message already reached your Inbox's. Hello, Today I attended the opening day of Foss.in held at Bangalore. Thought I did let in on the happenings of the day. The registration was supposed to start at 8:00 am, it started around 9:45. But considering that it was organized by people who claim to be part of the community that was fine, but then Mr. Atul Chitnis of BLug apologized *partly* for the delay, I guess the many of us who stood in the Q were to blame for the rest of the part. The first talk was by Mr. Alan Cox, it was very good as expected, But then there was never a mention of the word free, and there seemed to be this talk of the last 10 years of *open* software, well I guess RMS and GNU were Living on some other planet before ten years. The only mention of Free or Freedom is there on the T-shirt that we got, we got that along with 25 coupons of ten rupees each which were part of our kit after registering for 500, I guess 500 is fine considering how things are here. For 10 rs we got a coffee which would have otherwise cost 3 or 4. And there were many people with fancy kind of dressing saying a thank you in an alien accent, maybe they want to sound "cool". Well the point is this, if these people cannot react to the very basic injustice that goes on, then they are in no position to be part of a community which wants freedom. We got a bootable DVD too, and someone said it was supposed to be the mother of all DVD's that are given out because it had multiple distros, well I didn?t get Debian GNU/Linux on that. And then there was the Expo, and it had Airtel marketing their Broadband connection. I told the people there that Airtel has blocked IRC in Bangalore and tried to convince them that IRC is a sort of lifeline especially when irc.debian.org had helped me a lot, but then they didn?t notice me much because there were all these "Open" source enthusiast here for whom IRC doesn?t matter as long as Yahoo chat works. The key word was "Non commercial", it?s been said the whole meet is non commercial. I think I understand, after all the Iraqis are "free" now. I just wrote this mail because am happy to have known people like Balakrishnan sir though this group who really want to help and really want the community to grow. These so called software engineers in Bangalore see GNU/Linux from a totally different perspective. I really don't know what that perspective is but it?s not the same like I have seen it at ILUG-Cochin. I think people here are merely playing into the hands of Companies who want to make hay while the sun shines. So I think I will stick to free software and with each passing day understand more why Stallman always says free software and GNU/Linux. And please don't get me wrong, there were interesting and useful projects being exhibited like the phoenix http://www.nsc.res.in/~elab/phoenix/ but I just voiced my concern regarding *Open* source. Justin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Mailinglist mailing list Mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org http://ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://ilug-cochin.org/pipermail/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org/attachments/20051218/a18ff902/attachment-0001.htm
