[Fsf-friends] History of Free Software movement in India

[justin joseph]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Anivar Aravind
<anivar.aravind at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Friends
>
> In kochi conference I did a presentation on History of Free Software
> movement in India. (I presented my session after the boycott novell
> campaign and manhandling )
> The slide of the presentation is available at
> http://anivar.movingrepublic.org/wp-content/uploads/storydom.pdf
> (Thanks Hiran for the Theme & design)
>
> I am planning to make this as an article. Please go through it and
> point if i missed any groups
> So please send your feedback
> Also it will help the people in this list to get the name of various
> groups contributed to the Free Software movement

Were discussing the aspects of this presentation with Sammer of ILUG
cochin at the Cochin conference.
He had suggested that a wiki needs to be used so that people
everywhere in India can add points
and contributions, the same can be validated and ascertained.

Chronicling "History" needs all the importance that it deserves, what
were the procedures/methodologies
that were used to come to conclusions.. etc..

When compared to code swarm kind of an approach where mere history of
commits are used, writting History
of a movement is tricky in my opinion and so needs maximum
transparency.  And i thought the wiki idea is worth
considering.

If you listen to Greg's talk below:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/media/talks/gregkh/talk_2008-06-05_Greg_Kroah_Hartman_on_the_Linux_Kernel.ogg

One can see that 18.5%(top most percentage) of the Linux kernel code
contributors are "Amateurs" whose works are not
associated with any formal organizations, the category at the fifth
place(5.5%) is from "Unknown Individuals".  The contribution from
 Canonical??? (you can view the video to find that out :-) )

The point am trying to make is that there might be a lot of people out
there who might want to add to this because History
is History.  Maybe they don't bother and would prefer to remain
"Unknown Individuals" but for the sake of transparency I suggest
that a Wiki comes up and a campaign initiated that History is being
written, people who might want to mention the past which
they think are relevant in the Context of the Free software movement
can add the same.

>
> Anivar Aravind
>
> --
> Any responsible politician should be encouraging a home grown Free
> Software industry because it creates the basis for future jobs.
> Learning Windows is like learning to eat every meal at McDonalds.
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