Praveen Arimbrathodiyil blogs here

Yesterday we had discussions about the FOSS model and its various aspects. Tojin analysed the economic aspect and he says

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There are so many people working in the proprietary software industry and if there is only FOSS out there so many people are gonna lose jobs. Now both proprietary and free software needs service and so the effects cancels. The jobs of developers will not be there and the economy suffers. He argues that only if the money changes hands the country benifits. Also he thinks it is sinister about the way GNU/Linux is distributed, he says it has made so complx that they need to go to experts everytime.

He is not thinking about the obvious advantages. In a country like India we cannot afford to pay a huge amount of money on softwares. They are completely ignoring the points of technical fitness of the software developed. They still think of the FOSS as something like this

>> A company develops a product and give away that for free (download) and asks how the developers get money ?

They completely ignores that FOSS is a process not a product in which lots of people around the world and it is centered around the end user.
Other argument is that anyway we are getting windows and linux free (pirated in case of windows) and all things that could be done with windows can be done with windows and there is no point in moving away from windows.

They don’t think piracy is not a problem, as long as they don’t come to you and arrest they think they are safe. It is like you don’t hesitate to steal if you are sure you won’t be cought. Also they neglect the social aspect (but the former point nullifies this). Anyway you are ready to give it to your friend so the social aspect doesn’t matter anymore.

the discussion continues ….
Some one give me an answer to the economic aspect (the loss of jobs and affecting the economy)

Today the weather was really romantic ! It drizzled and it seemed to rain at any time. I am very happy after the floss meet, it was simply great. Everyone appreciated our efforts and we hope this will trigger discussions in the campusand in the society around. We had heated discusions yesterday with friends and in the class there were some arguments over matlab and octave (I missed it as it is a Monday!). All the sessions were great and every one here are gonna be pythonistas kudos to Swaroop and Pradeep, we had a very nice introduction to the pythonic way of thinking .. like explicit is better than implicit, beautiful is better than ugly …..
The Chitnis talk was excellent, his explanations were clear and simple and he had great analogies. Shanker Balan talked about ‘the devil‘s side of open source’. He talked about the BSD Operating syatem and its features. Yesterday we had trekking in Tusharagiri with Swaroop and Pradeep. It was a nice experience as they talked about the IT life and plus and minus about the coding life. Ckeck out Dilpu’s Blog for more inside stories.
Thanks a lot for the speakers who found time to come here and make this event a grand success. Also to KP Mohandas sir, Rajagopal sir, ATM sir, Pathari sir, Amal, Shyam, Tojin and all our juniors Ashwin, Jove, Pullat, Jithu, Bipin, Mathews, Hains …… who were with me and Dilpu to make this a memorable one.

Blog entries for the meet

Swaroop CH
Atul Chitnis
Shanker Balan
Pradeep Kishore Gowda
Dilip V
Arun Sivanandan

Also the slides of Atul Chitnis’ presentation is available at
‘Introducing Opensource & Opensource in India’
And Pradeep’s and Swaroop’s presentation is available at
‘Slither away with Python’.

Note: Photos of Thusharagiri trip is in Swaroop’s blog [After the meet on Sunday Dilip and me with Pradeep and Swaroop went for trekking at Thusharagiri]
Update: Check this blog

http://girlwithbigeyes.blogspot.com/2005/01/trip-to-tusharagiri.html

and see the pics
1. Swaroop’s http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/g2swaroop/album?.dir=9c25
2. Priya’s http://girlwithbigeyes.blogspot.com/2005/01/trip-to-tusharagiri.html

It was a wonderful break after the exams and I really enjoyed and relaxed. I went home on Thursay after the exams got over. Friday I celebrated Eid with Sabeel and today after Birthday celebration of my cousine Vrinda, I’m in a very happy and jolly mood. I left college at 5 pm and reched home by 8. Every time I go home, I used to listen to my favorite hindi songs. I had recorded a 90 casette with my favorite songs [Saajan, 1942 a love story, Dilse, Bombay ...]. I used to play this casette minimum 2 to 3 times. Some time back when the type recorder was not in good condition the casette got its toll, it got wringles but still could play. This time I was a sort of trouble shoot guy, I opened up the case and played with it and it almost become useless, but now it plays any how Now I am not going to record any casettes , It’s CDs now ! I got my first CD of songs from Dilpu [I converted the mp3's to ogg, which is a free format, though it took 1MB more for each song for same qulaity (if we convert from wav ,ogg has better compression and quality), freedom is important than convenience!]

Then my neighbor wanted to set their cable channels, they were not getting all the channels. The remote wasn’t that user-friendly, with some effort of trial and error I found out were they had the search opton. After getting all the channels they want all the Malli channels in stating [1, 2 ...]. So I had to set it manually [Though I tried to check for a swap option, I couldn't find any]. Also I set a child lock on F TV

Then my uncle Bose wanted to setup the VCR, it was not automatically detected in TV/Video mode. So I tried to search and got it in UHF band. It was tough as the language was not English that time. I had the manul with me and somehow I manged to set it to English.

I’ll write about these later

Gotta go now

Just another exam to go and I’ll be leaving for home tomorrow. Not much to write these days. It is not my style to study for the exams [I used to attend classes and take notes during the starting of the course and got nice marks. Now when I started bunking marks also gone -- Hope not to bunk too many classes now]. Anyway yesterday I ‘visited’ our reading room.

I’ll be meeting Sabeel at home, he’ll be coming home for Bakrid. We’ve been learning parellel from LKG [sometimes I leave the school to join him after some years and sometimes he leave the school to join after some years]. LKG, UKG we were in the same class. Then 1 – 2 we moved to the same school, for third I left and joined him in 7th in another school[GOHSS Edathanattukara -- I call it e-kara ] he left in 8th and 11th [last Pre Degree batch in MES Kalladi College] we were in the same college but this time he chose Biology while I chose Maths. Then after first year he chose to go with maths and left our college and joined in Plus Two. Now I’m here in NITC and he is in CET.

Today we took print out of our modified poster. Also today me and Amal Dev called Arun of FSF. We hope to have a stall of FSF T-shirts for our floss conference. Now we’ve to setup an online registration form for it [we use plone so we'll have to learn how to do it -- fortunately has offered to help]. I’ll have to wait till I come back from home.

Today I read some nice blogs from links of my friends. Blogging is a wonderful thing and when you get comments you feel great satisfaction! Yesterday I’ve been playing with wikipedia and added some content about glugc, tricalzone and some links added to FLOSS [our meet page] and to NIT Calicut …. Also today in spymac all mutual frieds invitations are accepted. Today Dilpu got an orkut [It is one social networking site from google like tickle] invitation. I’ll be getting one soon.