[Fsf-friends] And now the Kerala Electricity Board goes Microsoft

[Raj Shekhar]

Suraj Kumar wrote:

> While I think  communism is partly a solution  to removing proprietary
> software  companies and  make  it a  state-owned  affair, the  current
> "trend" of these politicians will make it a worse environment for free
> software to thrive. 

Though this is no place to discuss capitalism & communism, I would like 
to point out that a very good author on this topic is Ayn Rand. She fled 
from Russia, settled in USA and hence she could write about both of the 
philosphies using first hand knowledge. The very idea of communism is 
wrong. Why should "some one produce according to ones ability and get 
paid according to his needs."

However lets leave that aside and talk about Indian  politicians. 
Passing laws to make something 'mandatory' is worse. We should be able 
to show the people that options much better than M$ exist.Not many 
people know excellent support is available in GNU/Linux. Many still 
think that we are still stuck in the CLI. How many people in your 
neighbourhood know about OpenOffice, TeX? A few people were shocked when 
I told them that some quite competent pfellows hang around on LUG 
mailing lists and jobs recruitment can be done on LUGs.(happily they 
have agreed to try to use it next time,lets hope) People should know 
about something's existence before they can use it.

I think spreading the word should be our first priority. Putting out 
articles in magazines, newspapers, conferences, college magazines should 
not be looked upon as unnecessary

-- 
Raj Shekhar	
http://geocities.com/lunatech3007/