[Fsf-friends] Software Freedom Day celebrated

[doxa at sancharnet.in]

Professional engineering students at MES College of Engineering organised a
workshop "Mukti - liberate, enlighten, inspire", as part of celebrations of
Software Freedom Day organised by the Free Software enthusiasts at the
institution on 07 Oct 2005. Arun M and Anivar Aravind of FSF-India spoke and
demonstrated the potential and enormous computing flexibility of Free
Software.

The event witnessed the FS Students' Chapter at MES College of Engineering
releasing  over 350 Compact Disks of 'Ubuntu', a distribution of GNU Operating
System derived from Debian GNU Linux. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word,
meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who
we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the
software world.

A primary goal of the Ubuntu Foundation is to ensure that a high quality
distribution of free and open source software is available free of charge,
throughout the world. "Free software is produced by expert volunteers who make
their time and work freely available - our goal is to ensure that anybody in
the world can make the best use of that work, at no charge." claims Ubuntu
Community Relations, Netherlands based group that promotes Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Foundation has made public commitments that Ubuntu will always be freely
available, without the need for royalties or licence payments of any kind. "We
include only free and unencumbered applications, ensuring that users have the
ability to share and modify their software."

As part of the 'bootstrapping process' of initiating the Free Software learning
curve within the professional student community, the FS Students Chapter
conducted parallel technical sessions at beginner, intermediary and expert
levels within the institution, prior to the workshop.

 Anivar Aravind, Co-ordinator, FSF-India demonstrated a session on "Compiling
Linux Kernel in a GNU system". The session focussed on compiling Linux Kernel
in a GNU System to optimise the kernel for the present hardware configuration.

Arun M, Secretary, FSF India spoke on "Freedom Matters" as part of FSF 
Movement's advocacy on the subject. The session  explained the larger goals of
Free Software Foundation of India. Discussions for funding viable software
projects that would be of benefit to the Small and Medium enterprises or to the
local community followed the Workshop.

Dr M Achuthan, former Professor at IIT Bombay, earlier inaugurated the event.
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Cheers,
CK Raju

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