[Fsf-friends] Free Software in Kerala ... a very interesting story

[Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया]]

http://swatantryam.blogspot.com/2007/08/story-of-free-software-in-kerala-india.html

Free Software in Kerala

V. Sasi Kumar

A friend, who had worked in Brazil for a couple of years, once told
me, "Kerala is known in Latin America for Free Software." This
indicates the extent to which Kerala has dominated the Free Software
scenario in India. It is not by chance that the headquarters of the
Free Software Foundation of India happened to be situated at
Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. The state is now poised to become the
first in the country to introduce exclusively Free Software for IT
education in high schools. We shall examine here how all this came
about....

The story apparently began with the introduction of TeX, the
typesetting program that was designed in the 1970s by Donald Knuth,
the author of The Art of Computer Programming, a four volume classic.
TeX was introduced into Kerala by Prof. K.S.S. Namburipad of the
Department of Mathematics in the University of Kerala. TeX could
typeset mathematical equations very neatly, which no other software
could do, especially in the 1980s when Prof. Namburipad brought TeX in
fourteen floppy disks from the United States. He could bring the
program and use it on a number of computers without any legal problem
because it had no licences-it was in the public domain. It was, in a
sense, the Grandmother of Free Software, as some people call it.

Prof. Namburipad encouraged his students to learn and use TeX,
especially for preparing their theses. One of his students was E.
Krishnan, now with the Mathematics Department of the University
College, Thiruvananthapuram, a leading exponent of TeX and one of the
auA thors of the very popular LaTeX primer2 published as an electronic
book by the Indian TeX User Group. Dr. Krishnan also played an
important role in establishing the Free Software Foundation of India.
Another person inspired by Prof. Namburipad was one C.V. Radhakrishnan
who used to run a small centre that prepared theses for the research
students of the Kariavattom campus of the University of Kerala.

--
Frederick Noronha  Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org
In Hyderabad. Ph 040-23132176 SMS: 9822122436