The GnuVision Blog

One more case for Harald Welte - this time, its Skype which has “challenged” the GPL saying that the GPL as a whole violates anti-trust regulation!

If you see a University insisting that its student’s learn wordprocessing with MS-WORD, do visual programming with VB and stuff like that, please note it down at this page:

fci.wikia.com/wiki/Syllabus_Review

Here is Venkatesh Hariharan’s Call for volunteers for the syllabus change drive

One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? “The commons” refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources.

If you have some interest in the philosophy of Free Software, Read more - Bollier’s essay provides the sort of Advance Organizers that educational psychologists talk of when learning a new concept! Be sure to read even if you have no interest in Free Software - it won’t be disappointing!

Here is RMS’s response to the essay.

Free Software in India - Cover Story

How stupid it was for us to debate about stuff like ODF/OOXML without understanding the meaning of “standards”! Now that Microsoft has defined it clearly for our benefit, the darkness has vanished and everything is as clear as sunlight.

Businesses have discovered a new way of doing things—the professional way. And this way has much to do with Standards.

Original Microsoft software is the standard for Operating Systems, Office Productivity, Server and Developer Tools.

In even simpler terms, we define:

What Microsoft does is THE STANDARD

Period

People like Don Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra are some of the true heroes of the Art and Science of Computer Programming. In an industry obsessed with buzzrwords, trends and fashion, we sometimes forget that the “industry” would never have been possible in the first place without the deep, timeless, pioneering work undertaken by men like these. Compared to them, much of the “software” industry is like a big dance/music “reality show” - crass, superficial, noisy - performers come in, become instant celebrities and soon vanish without a trace!

Read this great interview with Knuth

Yes - Knuth uses Ubuntu, prefers FVWM over GNOME/KDE and feels that Open Source will completely dominate the economy (He says - “I trust my family jewels only to Linux”)!

I find his dislike for `resuable’ code (toolkits, libraries) intriguing - why does he say that it is a `menace’? Isn’t an “open source” (Knuth calls it “re-editable”) toolkit a good thing? You can’t accuse Knuth of sitting in an academic ivory tower - he is not only a mathematician but also one of the greatest programmers of all time! (Maybe, he hates only non-editable “black box” toolkits provided by vendors like MS).

He is 70 years old, diagnosed with prostate cancer and still continues to write/research with amazing passion!

Check out code.google.com/soc

Here are the projects from my students at Govt Engineering college, Trichur:

Full Text Search Implementation for the content management system, Bricolage

Zope2 on Python2.5

All Indic Language Themes and Improvements in Tuxtype

Additional Features to Tuxtype

In addition, we also have three mentors from GECT this year.

Here is one blog entry which succinctly describes why Greenspan / Rand capitalism doesn’t work:

Greenspan, Rand and reality

Things have already gone too far - do we wish for the day to come when the stock market controls how much we pay for our food?

read more …

Microsoft suddenly wants to make the people of Kerala “e-literate” - and if this report is true, we will soon be hearing about the virtues of MS software from our own dear Mammootty!

Hope he reads this letter and decides to say “NO” to Bill.G, just like he said NO to coca-cola.

For over a decade, we were assured that everything good that ever happened was because we had embraced corporate-led globalisation. All the negative effects visible were the result of our own national inertia and corruption. And of course, the market would heal all wounds. The notion of state meddling in economic matters was blasphemy. Now the nations feeding us this rot — which we recite by rote — are nationalising banks, bailing out brigands and pouring in funds to stop factories from closing down.

And of course, we’ve spared no efforts to link our agriculture to the volatility of global prices in a world where a handful of corporations control those prices. Their clout within India has grown rapidly. Their control extends further each day from the field and farm gate to the price and sale of the final product.

Read Between a rock and a hard place