It’s My life
Richard M Stallman (RMS) will be in Karnataka from 13th December to 17th December.
See Events in Bangalore for more details. RMS will be in Mysore on 14th and Tumkur on 17th. Stay tuned to FSUG Bangalore mailing list for any updates.
Update 1:
Sujith has blogged about it (Also see his flickr photos)
Update 2:
Sreejith has written about RMS visit to AC3 (Ambedkar Community Computing Center).
There was a discussion on ilugd about how Sun can continue to provide VirtualBox non-OSE edition despite there is a GPLed version.
Dual licensing and Free Software business models in general are one of my favorite topics. So I sat down and made a diagram explaining the source code flow of a dual licensed software.
A message with great insight, which I found in the flurry of messages back and forth in all major mailing lists across India.
In a debate on question of “free vs non-free” or “role of non-free in free
conferences”, this one is drifting towards private and personal references
which can be avoided. Let not Novell get off the hook by stirring trouble
here. There are countless private conferences and symposiums going around
nearby which promote themes of non-free and patents. No free software
activist goes there to register protest.Differences of opinion are usually accorded highest priority in a democratic
institution, as they may be revealing something very surprising or
innovative – silencing and subjugating are hallmarks of despotic or
autocratic institutions. No one expects the entire rank and file of
organisers to be aware of non-free designs; Novell could have very well
evaded such a public scrutiny before gaining entry here, especially when it
has very little public presence in Kerala.Free Software conferences serve many purposes and we can accept that one
such method in revealing or knowing about non-free intrusions could be
through some kind of non-violent protest – stickers, posters and T-shirts
are hallmarks of FS protests. Now many of us know what Novell does, and such
an exposure on Novell coincides perfectly with the theme of our public
conference in disseminating concepts on Free Software.Since public institutions have a say on private lives, it cannot be beyond
criticism. Just like “divine rights” cannot be placed over “human rights”,
it would be equally suicidal if we uncritically submitted to “political
rights” of any party. After all, political parties gain power only after
they appeal before citizens – notably the poor-off ones. Hence sharing dias
or approaching leaders is in no way a transgression, it falls perfectly
under rights of citizens. No established leader or representative would ever
think this way.Here, a wrong has been committed by (a) humiliating an individual who
protests against a non-free incursion inside a Free Software conference and
disseminates non-free ideology and (b) protecting the non-free intruder to
display their non-free trickery without objections. Novell has succeeded in
driving the wedge, inflicting a kind of perfect damage to a contributors’
community and getting away scot-free.CK Raju
mukt.in 2008 was a great experience and I wanted to write about, but couldn’t till now.
The most interesting thing about mukt.in was the level of interaction it offered. I had some very interesting discussions with many in the community and students. Pavithran had gathered many familiar names in the Indian Free Software community for the event. Hiran and Shyam decided to come in the last minute. Hiran was taking a session on font designing and Shyam on speech recognition.
Morning itself I met Warren of Drupal and started discussing with him about debian and ubuntu. We discussed issues relating to both the projects and was thinking of having some publicity efforts around lenny release in September. I started a thread in DebianIndia about this. Now that I won’t be in India for sometime, I hope someone would follow it up (Kartik?).
Pavithran and Shreekrishna were running around making things happen. We had some discussion around localization and challenges. Some things we discussed were having consistent translations across all applications and when to transliterate (use the same words in English).
Then Shaktimaan took out his Neo FreeRunner by OpenMoko project and everyone started playing with it. I got the chance to make first call on that mobile.
We had a plus meet at Paradise hotel with Riyaz Usman joining us for dinner. We ran in the rain, took a bus, walked on the railway platform and took and auto to reach Paradise. It was Pavithran’s brilliant idea to take a platform ticket and walk on the platform since all the roads were filled with water and would have to swim otherwise.
Second day we had a very interesting BoF on Education. Thyagarajan from ilugc was telling beautiful stories about his experiences and we all shared our experiences and views on what education should provide.
Then before we concluded the event there was lightning talks of five minutes by each speaker. It was with great happiness and satisfaction I started my journey back home. But there was a twist to that journey, that I will write later 
The amazing collaboration and enthusiasm showed by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing’s (SMC) KDE subproject made this possible. We had to cross the kde essentials barrier, which is required for inclusion in a KDE release as a supported language in a very short span of time. We achieved this milestone by completing 10000+ strings in about 10 days by 30+ contributors. KDE essentials include the most important packages that a default installation will have including the libraries and the base applications. Other Indian languages to be supported in this release are Hindi, Tamil and Panjabi. Exciting thing about this milestone is the participation of people from all walks of life including students, farmers, scientist, engineers …
Some statistics here shows the progress of Malayalam translations in a week (during the most active week). Click to enlarge.
Many of us were working till 3-4 am in the morning for the entire week leading upto the 4.1 deadline on July 11. #smc-project on Freenode IRC was the main connection for realtime collaboration with ‘mandoos’ (an IRC bot who can learn maanings and teach anyone who asks for it) helping the newly joined members of the team. You can join the IRC channel using your web browser by following this link.
People from all over the globe and round the clock joined this effort. Some places to mention are Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, USA … The enthusiam showed by the members throughout this great effort was amazing. In one single day 5 new contributors submited their first translation and more than 30 people contributed to this effort (Most of the contributors are listed here). It could be one of the few languages which completed kde essentials translations in such a short time.
You can see the list languages sorted by their percentatge of translations here. Malayalam is currently at 63rd position, 4th among Indian languages.
Here are some interesting screenshots of KDE 4.1 in Malayalam.
More screenshots from here.
I would like to thank the entire team for making this possible and do join us in the release party on Aug 9th and 10th at Thiruvananthapuram. Location and event schedule to be announced later (tune in to our mailing list for more details)
Update 1:
List of contributors. Thanks to Ani Peter for making this list.
1. Sasi Kumar
2. AnilKV
3. Ashik
4. Anoop
5. Anoopan
6. Prasad. S R
7. Hari Vishnu
8. Manu
9. Santhosh
10. Praveen
11. Manilal
12. Sushma
13. Sujith
14. Smitha
15. Remya
16. Hiran Venugopalan
17. Hitha Venugopalan
18. Chandrettan
19. Sankaranarayanan
20. Pratheesh
21. Syam Krishnan
22. Shiju Alex
23. Ragsagar V
24. Maxin B John
25. Sarath Lakshman
26. Baiju. M
27. Joju Joshua
28. Afsal
29. Nishan
30. Rajiv and his Mandoos
31. Ani
After lot of confusions and uncertainties finally I am leaving to Google’s head quarters in Mountain View, California, USA for attending Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2007. I’m representing Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC), the only organisation from India in the program (gnowledge project participated as part of GNU project). It is a great feeling to be representing India in this event. I am leaving this morning (5th October 2007) and will be back on Tuesday. The event is on Saturday, 6th October. The idea of this meeting of mentors from all participating projects from around the world is to share this years experience from the program and discuss ideas for next year’s summer of code.
Will write more after the event.
This post is Malayalam, if you are not able to see this post properly you may need to consult this page – http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Malayalam/help
പുതിയൊരു ശബ്ദാത്മക നിവേശകരീതിയുമായി ഇത്തവണ വന്നത് ജിനേഷാണ്. ഗൂഗിള് കോഡിന്റെ വേനലില് സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് പങ്കെടുക്കുന്ന 5 സംരംഭങ്ങളിലൊന്നാണിത്. ഏതാനും ദിവസങ്ങള്ക്ക് മുന്പാണ് സന്തോഷ് സ്വനലേഖ* എന്ന് പേരിട്ട തന്റെ സ്കിം നിവേശകരീതിയ്ക്കുള്ള മലയാളം ശബ്ദാത്മക പ്ലഗിനുമായി വന്നത്.
ബോല്നാഗരി എന്ന പേരില് ദേവനാഗരി ലിപിയ്ക്ക് വേണ്ടി ഇന്ഡ്ലിനക്സ് സംരംഭം തയ്യാറക്കിയ കീബോര്ഡ് വിന്യാസത്തെ അടിസ്ഥാനമാക്കിയാണ് ഇത് തയ്യാറാക്കിയിട്ടുള്ളത്. വളരെ എളുപ്പത്തിലുപയോഗിയ്ക്കാവുന്നതും കൂടുതല് സജ്ജീകരണങ്ങളോ മറ്റ് സോഫ്റ്റ്വെയറുകളോ ആവശ്യമില്ലാത്തതുമാണ്. ഈ കാരണം കൊണ്ടുതന്നെ ജിനേഷ് ഇതിനെ “ലളിത” എന്ന് വിളിയ്ക്കുന്നു. ഇതിനെപ്പറ്റി കൂടുതലറിയാന്
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Lalitha എന്ന താള് കാണുക.
സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിലേയ്ക്ക് കൂടുതല് ആളുകള് ആകൃഷ്ടരാകുന്നതും, സംരംഭം വളരെ സജീവമാകുന്നതും, വളരെ സന്തോഷമേകുന്ന കാര്യമാണ്. അതു പോലെത്തന്നെ സരായ് ഫെലോഷിപ്പിന് വേണ്ടിയും സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് വഴികാട്ടുന്ന സംരംഭങ്ങള്ക്കപേക്ഷിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ട്.
സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങില് നിങ്ങള്ക്കും പങ്കുചേരാം. ഇതിനായി പ്രത്യേക സാങ്കേതിക മികവോ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറില് പരിജ്ഞാനമോ അത്യാവശ്യമില്ല. “എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിന് എന്റെ ഭാഷ” എന്ന മുദ്രാവാക്യം പ്രാവര്ത്തികമാക്കുന്നതിന് സഹകരിയ്ക്കാന് തയ്യാറുള്ളൊരു മനസു മതി. ചര്ച്ചകളില് പങ്കെടുക്കാനായി
http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss/
എന്ന താള് കാണുക.
* സ്വനലേഖയെക്കുറിച്ച് കൂടുതലാറിയാനും അതുപയോഗിയ്ക്കാനുള്ള നിര്ദ്ദേശങ്ങള്ക്കും
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Swanalekha എന്ന താള് കാണുക.
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing to celebrate this summer with 5 projects selected for Google Summer of Code.
http://code.google.com/soc/smc/about.html
It is really great to see SMC coming back to life after a long period of lull. Now we have great participation from students and 5 projects with Google Summer of Code is a recognition for the work we were doing.
The selected projects are
Unicode Standard Malayalam Font
by Hiran V, mentored by Hussain K.H
Akshara OCR
by Antony Francis Maliakal, mentored by Anivar A Aravind
Basic Voice Recognition System for malayalam
by shyam k, mentored by Santhosh Thottingal
MalluTux
by Mobin M, mentored by Praveen A
Comprehensive Malayalam input system for GNU/Linux
by jinesh kj, mentored by suresh p
It is also exciting to see 8 students from Kerala getting selected for SoC this time. Looking forward to a great summer full of coding and fun.
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is the only organisation directly participating in google Summer of Code from India (gnowledge project is also participating as a part of GNU project). Thanks a lot for all the SMC members who had come together and made this possible. Lets continue our good work. You can join our mailing list and participate in our activities. Our mailing lis at http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss
It is great to see HP support for Debian GNU/Linux on its Servers and ThinClients.
HP gives your organization a single point of service accountability for community-supported Debian GNU/Linux distributions. Our close relationship with the Debian community coupled with our engineering investment to qualify specific distributions to run on selected HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers enables us to supplement your in-house expertise in addressing Debian-specific software technical problems and related server issues.
Experienced HP Services professionals collaborate with your IT team to identify Debian GNU/Linux-related problems, and they offer trustworthy advice on known software fixes. For unresolved problems, HP will work with the Debian community to develop bug fixes and help ensure their inclusion in future distributions.
National Institute of Technology, Calicut will be hosting a two day, technical event pertaining to Free and Open Source Software, namely FOSS Meet@NITC 2007, on 2nd, 3rd and 4th of March 2007. The event will consist of talks, bofs, workshops and competions based on free and open source softwares. This is the third edition of the event conducted by GNU/Linux Users Group Calicut.
The Honourable Chief Minister of Kerala Shri V S Achuthanandan will be the chief guest for the event.
Participants and Volunteers are required to register online at the foss meet website.
Looking forward to your support and participation.
More details of the event at:
* website
* wiki
* Mailing List
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