[Fsf-friends] [Fsf-kerala] Free Software in Higher Secondary

[V. Sasi Kumar]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 10:54 +0100, Juan Carlos Gentile Fagundez wrote:

> I subscribed to this list to understand  how Free Software - Free Knowledge is 
> going on in India (since I'm from South-America and from Italy). (And 
> specially Kerala since is apparently there where things are doing better). 

Thank you, Juan, for joining the list. I am sure you will have some
suggestions for popularising Free Software in this country. Free
Software is not doing all that great in India, though there is some
progress in parts of the country, and Kerala is one of them. But still
there is much to be done. As you must have seen from the discussion here
recently, we are trying to see how the Higher Secondary (classes 11 and
12) syllabus can be rid of proprietary software. And then we need to
push Free Software into engineering and other courses.

> I want also to understand more the role of FSF-India in this topics. In 
> South-America and in Europe we don't have good experiences with "our" FSFs, 
> (considering we have them... :)

Being a part of FSF India, I wouldn't attempt to judge our activities.
But I will just mention two important areas where our efforts have
succeeded, of course with help from many others. These are 1) preventing
the introduction of software patents and 2) getting India to vote
against Microsoft's attempt to get its OOXML format accepted as an ISO
standard. I am sure that you will soon learn more from the discussions
here.

> A suggestion:
> Will be interesting to have part of the FSF-India web-site dedicated to 
> education deeply, with wiki and also a very extensive list of softwares for 
> education. There are lots.

I think this would be a good idea. Let me see what the other members of
the Board say.

Regards
-- 
V. Sasi Kumar
Free Software Foundation of India
http://swatantryam.blogspot.com