Hi stefan
I am from Kerala and working with a free software Development+L10n
community called Swathanthra malayalam Computing
Free Software Development is kerala is active. But one of the major
problem with this article is it is only addressing Lobbying efforts to push
free software in State & its education.
Sasikumar narrates the history of Free software foundations trivandum
(capital of state) based activities
For example, A lot of development on GNU hurd is happening by the
students in MES college of engineering, Kuttippuram. Last year they
released a LX installer for Debian GNU/Hurd and later it extended support
offical GNU System. While looking at last weeks GNU Hurd list archive you
can find a lot of recent Gsoc Proposals also
There are a lot of Free Software Developers from Kerala also like Gopal
of DotGNU project Baiju.M of Zope foundation etc.
We swathanthra malayalam computing ( swathanthra means freedom) is
Developer community working on L10n , Standardisation, Developement of Local
language Computing. last year we qualified for Google summer of code too.
within last 1.5 years we our team expanded from 3-60 .. with nearly 15
package releases
Anivar Aravind
Hi,
What Anivar has written is true. I wrote that article. My intention
was originally to write the history of the Free Software Foundation of
India, but somehow, while I went about it, a lot of other material
came in and the objective got diverted, which I realised only much
later. Since the deadline was over and I was in a full time job where
there was much pressure, I was not really able to go through the
article again with the original obhjective in mind. As a consequence,
the article became thoroughly mixed up. I think I should rewrite it
now.
Actually there are several developers in India who have contributed to
doubly free software. Prabhu Ramachandran who developed MayaVi, a 3D
data visualisation application comes to mind. He was a student at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (Madras) at that time. A
number of people have contributed to localisation, which I think is
one of the main areas of contribution. There are people working in
other projects too, as Anivar has mentioned.
That person said that in India nobody would have the idea to program
after business hours. And that in a country where indeed there is a
comparatively high computer literacy.
To illustrate what I mean: If you would write a history of Free
Software in Germany there are also some businesses but the Free
Software community consisting of volunteers *needs* to be mentioned.
I wonder whether you omitted that history for Kerala for some reason,
whether you would share the statement that there is virtually no
Doubly Free Software development in India / Kerala or what else
applies.
As mentioned earlier by Anivar and also myself, it is not true that
there is no doubly free software development in Kerala, or India for
that matter. But I agree with Michel. Though India has a large
population, about 1 billion, the first concern for most people is
livelihood. The percentage of computer literate may be less than ten
percent and programmers still less. However, many who are able to find
time after taking care of their basic needs do come forward to
contribute. My feeling is that this does not really relate to the
extent of income. In fact, this is just a feeling, such people more
often come from the middle class than from the really wealthy.
V. Sasi Kumar
Free Software Foundation of India
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