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Re: [ox-en] The Story of Free Software in Kerala, India

Stefan Merten wrote:

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Hi Frederick!

6 months (199 days) ago Frederick \"FN\" Noronha wrote:

  The Story of Free Software in Kerala, India

  This is the story of Free Software in the state of Kerala in India. I
  wrote this for a book entitled Knowledge Society and Development --
  Kerala Experience edited by Antony Palackal of Loyola College,
  Thiruvananthapuram, and Wesley Shrum of Louisiana State University.
  The article is published under a free licence, as mentioned at the end
  of the article. I am putting a slightly modified version here so that
  any interested person can make use of it.


Thanks for sharing this here.

It struck me that all the examples of Free Software you gave were
either business oriented or somehow state / education driven. Indeed
it reminded me of another Indian person who on some conference
explained that in India virtually nobody is developing Doubly Free
Software - i.e. there are virtually no volunteers who participate in a
Free Software project just for the sake of having fun and helping the
project.


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







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.


						Grüße

						Stefan
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