[fsug-bangalore] Knock knock.

[Sajith T S]

Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:

> The movement was already damaged in July 2001, when the FSF-India was started
> and subsequent dramatic scenes enacted by certain people. Read archives for
> more info.

I'm not sure the old archives are any more there, since the lists
changed location and names. I don't have much of a clue what happened
with the organisation as such. But that's not what I want to talk about.

I was a student during the time in question, helping to organise the
talk RMS would give at my college. I was subscribed to the then FSF
India mailinglist from the very begining, had read up a lot of material
on software freedom from the Internet, and was very much impressed and
excited about the whole thing. Hey, now that the FSF is in India, a sea
change is going to come! There was talks about helping student projects,
getting students to develop Free Software, all of which interested me.

But the revoloution never happened. What happened instead was many kinds
of ugly mudslinging and fighting over non-issues, in the mailing list.
I thought it to be the initial identity crisis over open source and
Linux. But gradually I became cynical of the whole FSF India idea and
unsubscribed from the FSF India list. I had had enough. Bleh, FSF India,
whats that?

Personally I don't have a problem with accepting people that talk about
Open Source and Linux and world domination, or whatever. People have
their opinions, and as long as people are thinking, there are going to
be differences in opinions. But the religious obsession with forcing
people to conform rather than think and the moral high handedness had
been disgusting.

With all respect to people that gets the real work done, I must say
that the kind of behaviour that was to be found in FSF India lists is
damaging to the philosophy and movement as a whole. (I must also say
that the people that gets the real work done had been largely silent
or busy with their work. Or that was my impression, correct or
incorrect.)

I have seen talented, thinking people that had the potential of making a
non-trivial contributions to the community moving away in disgust, after
their short interactions with the kind of people I'd been talking about.
Just thinking of the loss incurred makes me cringe.

What I'd been put down is not an objective and factual analysis of what
happened or what should be done. These are merely impressions I'd as an
observer of the whole phenomenon. If it helps, good. If it helps to get
me a flame or two, ugh :)

Sajith.
-- 
Your friends will know you better in the first moment you meet than
your acquaintances will know you in a lifetime.
                    -- Richard Bach, "Illusions"