Thursday, March 20, 2008

The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one.

Richard M Stallman writes in emac-devel list.

  What I'm trying to say is: I won't discuss which dVCS we choose
(unless it makes Windows development a PITA). But I agree with Jeremy
Maitin-Shepard that the cause of free software is strengthened by us
selecting among the free alternatives the one that best serves our
technical, not political, needs.

That is completely backwards. The free software movement is a
political cause, not a technical one. "Choose based on technical
criteria first of all" is the opposite of what we say.

There are many reasons why GNU packages should support other GNU
packages.

The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages. Its
intended result is a coherent operating system. It is particularly
important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU
packages. For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or
mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr.

The maintainers of one GNU package should use other GNU packages so
they will notice whether the packages work well together, and make
them work well together.

We also promote use of other GNU packages in this way.
Other people don't necessarily see which editor you use,
but they all see what dVCS you use.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Professors Slam Java As "Damaging" To Students

"The resulting set of skills [from today's educational practices] is insufficient for today's software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes) and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals... Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."

Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Free schools of proprietry software

Richard M Stallman gave a small speech at The University of Pavia, in Italy, in which he focused on the importance of having free software at schools.

Transcript here

I had to study Microsoft Access in my DBMS course at college. It was too late when I released that it
was the worst example !!

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Yet another great news..

"In the largest such simultaneous deployment of ‘free-and-open’ software in India, over 15 lakh Kerala schoolchildren on Friday start taking their quarterly practical tests in Information Technology on personal computers using a special Linux version."

Read more

Hats off to all unsung heroes behind the effort.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Its software freedom day !!

Its software freedom day.

Once again let us remember those people who have worked to give us
better and free softwares.
I had registered a team for celebrating software freedom day here.
I did get three t-shirts from them - but was not able to organize anything.
But I did upload OpenCD in our company's local repository. Hope that will
let people taste freedom this software freedom day.
Next year I am sure, we will organize something.

Meanwhile - read up V SasiKumar's story on Freedom Movement in Kerala.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

A myth called the Indian programmer

" They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore. "

Read more...



Bookmark

AddThis Social Bookmark Button