On Friday 03 May 2013 13:08:16 Venkat Mangudi wrote: > 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 <pranesh@cis- india.org>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.
By teeth I presume you mean some crony connection. As citizens, we demand that tax payers money NOT be squandered on systems that have time and agin proven to be pathetic in every sense of the word. > > 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. NONE of the FOSS systems prevent an end user from using any platform he desires, including windows. EXCEPT when M$ chooses not to do so as means to trapping the user and / or maintaining it's monopoly. This too has been proven innumerable times > > 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. A legitimate capitalist goal for public money is to provide the maximum to the end user. In this case strict adherenec to open document standards and software ensures maximum benefit to the end user and the market. Tell me how does the above goal satisfy the cpaitalist critirea when it uniquely favours a convicted mnopoly. Heck, just on that one score, M$ should be debarred from all tenders. > > 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. Has absolutely nothing to do with crooked business practices. > 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. Ignorance about the difference does not mean that it does not make a difference. It only makes the eventually realisation a lot more expensive and painful. > > Regards, > Venkat _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
