[LIG] Re: [FSF India] Re: WB Govt ties up with MSFT

[Pappu]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 11:52:46AM +0530, Radhakrishnan CV wrote:
> 
> It is a practical problem and let us not flame on it. I will agree
> with Raju on the draft letter since we are talking to the political
> leadership of a state government who are all well aware of the
> values of freedom and democracy.

May be. But by planning to use non free software, they don't prove
their awareness. Or may be, they don't know much about the freedom
(or lack of freedom) when it comes to software. If this is the case,
freedom is what we should talk of. Technical merrits of free software
can always be easily debated (non free world has some of the best 
lawyers trained to do just that).

We can always talk of 60% (?) websites in the world running on apache
and all such statistics, but people are ready with other statistics 
to counter this.

> 
> It might be a nice idea to add a paragraph on software freedom too
> which might be missing in the draft letter, 
Please don't reduce it to just another paragraph.

> but software freedom
> without software merits is not a convincing factor for the
> leadership to adopt it for governance, 
I feel that we should demand freedom, and just show the government
that ree alternatives exist. It is the duty of the government to
verify the technical merrits (we can help).

If they think that free software can't be used, then we should 
demand (as citizens of India) to delay this e-governance stuff until 
they feel otherwise. The government has no right to impose non free
stuff on us.

In summary, we should demand that the government use free software,
just for the sake of freedom. If they need help in verifying the
technical merrits of free software, it should be provided. But
these should not be (and cannot be IMHO) used as reasons for using
free software. The reason is always FREEDOM.

> for, you might not have dared
> to send this letter five years back when this very freedom was
> available then too in the same magnitude and dimension as we have
> now.
If e-governance is not possible with free software, it should not 
be implemented. 

> Therefore, let us make the draft letter complete with necessary
> addition of the paragraph(s) on freedom 
And removal of terms like open source..

bye,
pappu.