[Fsf-friends]Fund raising for FSF-India

[Ramanraj K]

Frederick Noronha (FN) wrote:

>The only handicap was the 
>lack of hardware for demos at their office premises, which they were very 
>generous to loan out to us without any charge for our meetings held over 
>the past two to three years.
>  
>
Recently, the Hindu reported that the Dept. of Atomic Energy made a 
grant of Rs. 3.5 crores to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, 
Chennai, out of which the Linux cluster that clocked 1.382 teraflops was 
realised at the cost of only about Rs. 2.5 crores - a fraction of what 
supercomputers of this pedigree would cost - `saving' about Rs. 1 Crore. 
 Would it be possible to convince DAE or the others involved in the 
project to share the remaining Rs. 1 Crore with FSF-India, to provide 
adequate resources for purchasing hardware, mirroring FSD from India, 
and support the various activities of FSF-India?

At this point, setting a target of Rs. 10 Crores would be reasonable to 
start with, so that FSF-India could have its own Hurd or Linux cluster, 
say spending the same 2.5 Crores, and use the rest of the corpus to 
create and share hardware resources wherever needed most.