My humble two cents below.
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Nagarjuna G. <[email protected]>wrote: > > On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Pranesh Prakash <[email protected]>wrote: > >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Dear all, >> What all would be our practical reasons for opposing this? >> >> > By 'practical' you mean to avoid all political reasons such as freedom of > the users, open standards, centralization leading to monopoly etc. > > Proprietary cloud platform is bad. SAAS is bad. > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html > > Three letters so far have been sent to AICTE, by FSF India, FSMI and IT > for Change. All three of them have given the reasons. How would you > classify those reasons? > > Also, is it legal to recommend one vendor by a Govt department? > > Have the letters made any change to the decision? Does FSF India, FSMI and ITfC have teeth? I suspect the answers to both are no. Although, our intentions are right, are we effecting change in the right way at the right time? Most of the time when one recommends FOSS, the users have practical issues. Support is just the tip of the iceberg there. Unless the ecosystem, which presently is sketchy at best, is rock solid to support change, we cannot hope to effect change. Cloud and SaaS are not bad. They are legitimate business with a goal, a capitalistic goal. I don't see why that is bad at all. Most of the users of this forum as well as other FOSS forums around the world have capitalistic ties. I think we should figure out who to bash and when. While I fully agree that enforcing a particular vendor or application is not fair, we should also try to educate the users to make a better impact. For relatively agnostic colleges in rural areas, it does not make an iota of difference if they use proprietary or FOSS. In fact, they they probably favour MS because that is all they know. Regards, Venkat
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