Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Techies press for digital freedom struggle

CHENNAI: Techies advocating free software on Sunday issued a rallying call to expand the “digital freedom struggle” as they celebrated the anniversary of the GNU/Linux project launched in 1984.

The convention of freedom and software, hosted by the Free Software Foundation of India, Tamil Nadu chapter, took note of a suggestion to chalk out a plan to spread the free software movement among engineering students in southern States, school students and rural masses.

The Linux user group of Chennai, led by M. Ramadoss. also launched “Kattatra Menporul”(Free Software), a Tamil publication that embodies the philosophy of free software spearhead Richard Stallman and provides localised versions of standard Linux desktop environments.

West Bengal IT Minister Debes Das said free and open software was the inevitable choice for governments planning to implement e-governance initiatives that penetrated to the panchayat level. Compared with proprietary software which was costly to install and entailed further expenses on upgrades, free software was cost-effective, secure and hardy while being open to customisation.

Pointing to the poor record of indigenous software development in India, Mr. Das said the West Bengal government was developing a local language e-governance software.

Prabhir Purkayastha, secretary, Delhi Science Forum, said a regime of software patents could pose a grave threat to indigenous software development in a country like India.

In essence, patenting software was to own a piece of algorithm, he said, and that amounted to patenting the fundamental math.

Kiran Chandra, director, Free Software Foundation, said the essence of the free software movement enshrined the fundamental freedom to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute any computer programme.

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