[ILUG-BOM] RMS in Mumbai

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On 15-Aug-06, at 4:52 PM, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:

>> true - i started using linux in 1996, and the first time i heard
>> about RMS was around 2002. And so far i havent read a single thing he
>> has written - although i have read almost everything ESR has written.
>
> Not even the GNU GPL? So you know about 'The Cathedral and The
> Bazaar', while not having read the GNU GPL? I do not have words to
> describe this.

no, i havent read the GPL. The first software i released was on CPAN  
- for license i just put 'same as perl'. Later, for my sf projects i  
chose GPL because it was the first choice on the sf list. Nowadays, i  
find that i use apache, postgres, subversion, python and django -  
none of them released under GPL. I am leaning to the view that most  
people who write FOSS code are too busy to bother themselves with the  
complexities and nit picking of the GPL and prefer a less obtrusive  
license which allows them to concentrate on what they do best -  
producing code. So I will probably be shifting my projects to a BSD  
style license in the near future.

>
>>> it's about the whole society. No matter how many ``Linux'' users are
>>> there in this world or how many companies support ``Open  
>>> Source'', the
>>> whole Free Software revolution will remain a failure as long as we
>>> don't understand what Freedom is.
>
>> i beg to differ - it will remain a failure in India at least until
>> people stopped sounding off and started writing code
>
> Write code for Microsoft or Apple?

a suprising amount of foss code *is* written for those platforms -  
see the top 20 on sourceforge


-- 
regards

Kenneth Gonsalves
Associate, NRC-FOSS
lawgon at au-kbc.org
http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/