'India key to global free software movement'

Monday, 10 March 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Not only does he love Indian music and food but the guru of free software keeps coming back to a country he believes will play a key role in the future of the global free software movement. Having wound up his sixth visit to India that took him to New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Dehradun and Rourkee, Richard Stallman is attracting more and more admirers in the country. In November, he had toured Bangalore, Goa and New Delhi. In his last visit, Stallman also took part in India's first free software festival organised by students of Pune's Symbiosis Institute. "The India visit was very useful," Stallman told IANS. He said the GNUnify event at Pune, to promote free software, was very successful. "In Mumbai I met professor Jitendra Shah who has developed GNU/Linux-based classes that are in use at 45 engineering colleges," he said. He also met several officials from the Indian government's IT ministry and "broached ideas of free software, which is sometimes overlooked by the open source movement." Stallman visited India for the first time in 1994. He was back again in 2000 and has since repeatedly visited the country. November 2002 saw his visit coincide with that of Microsoft chief Bill Gates, leading to a debate over what is the best way forward in building software to cope with the need of a talent-rich and resource-poor developing country. The free software and open source movements promote similar approaches towards sharing software. But the latter was launched in 1998 in what some see as an attempt to make its ideas more palatable to the business world, while the Stallman-headed Free Software Foundation is determined to ensure that free software focuses on the freedom of users and software writers. Stallman has also met Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research director Raghunath Mashelkar. "I also visited C-DAC (the state-run Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing) and spoke with them about making their Indic fonts free software," he said. Free software proponents are working determinedly, if in disparate initiatives, to promote use of Indian languages in computing system. If solutions come on time, this could help to popularise both free software and use of computers in a country where non-English languages are overwhelmingly the most influential and widely used. During his visit, Stallman also spoke with the head of the Left Front government in West Bengal. Local free software supporters have voiced some surprise over the decision of the state government that seem to favour proprietorial monopolies rather than cooperatively created alternative free software solutions. He however voiced concern over what he perceived as a "developing problem" in India. "The developers of a non-free programme, KalCulate, are presenting it to the Linux community as a contribution to our community simply because it runs on Linux (the operating system)," said Stallman. He argued that the free software global network "developed the GNU system so we could live in freedom, which means, avoiding non-free software". Stallman's March 2002 biography by journalist Sam Williams notes that while the Free Software message often gets a lukewarm response in the West, this is "contrasted by a warm response coming from overseas, especially Asia". "In India many people are interested in free software, because they see it as a way to build their computing infrastructure without spending a lot of money," the software guru told his biographer. On the other hand, Stallman, a man with strong political views, has argued that in China, the concept has been much slower to catch on. He argues that "comparing free software to free speech is harder to do when you don't have any free speech".
Source: IANS