RMS in Sri Lanka
The week ended was a great week for Sri Lankan FOSS community, as the father of Free Software Movement, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) paid a visit to the country. Yesterday, I got the opportunity not only to listen to a live speech of the legend, but also to grab a picture with him. It was at the main public event which held at SLIIT, Malabe, which was a full house !
RMS delivered a humors and really enlightening talk, which made everyone to have a self-retreat and understand how they are tied of with non-free software. Another important issue he brought up is the use of non-free(proprietary) software in schools and universities, which leads to tie users into these evil software for their entire lives. I think this issue should be taken seriously by developing countires like us, where we dream of a having standalone and stable economical environment without getting arrested by the multi-national firms. In the next decade this issue will take more concern with the growth of the IT market. It’s important for the country to produce IT professionals who know the concepts solidly without being dependent on the software to achieve that. Use of free software could provide ideal foundation for this.
Also in his speech RMS mentioned the easiest way for anybody to contribute and advocate free software. It’s by always calling the system GNU/Linux (not Linux only). If you are a keen follower of the FOSS world you will know this is the longest standing holy war in the community, but for me it seems GNU/Linux is the term we should use. Because GNU/Linux referrs to the great philosophy behind the whole movement not just the software.
It’s a pleasure to see such great people here in Sri Lanka and kudos for ICTA for their efforts in this endeavor.
Hail the St.iGNUicious (alias RMS)!
- 19th January 2008
- FOSS, Life, Sri Lanka, University
- Comments (14)
Comments
at 11:49 am
Isn’t most Open Source software just clones of existing products, with a few changes to make them better, mostly borrowed from closed-source software? Firefox stole tabbed browsing from Opera, but there were precursors even before that. OpenOffice is an inferior copy of Microsoft Office.
at 1:05 pm
OMFG. look at those geeks! lol.
at 7:47 pm
Pugnacious >> Sorry that’s really far from the truth. Are you aware of FOSS products like Apache - the web server which powers runs 80% of web sites ? and even can any existing browser match the current usability and stability Firefox offers ?
And do you think closed software doesn’t copy ? Did Microsoft innovated Windows or even Apple did innovate Macintosh ? - Read this story and know the history
at 12:52 am
You’re avoiding the question I was posing, trying to sidetrack it with an irrelevant example. In answer to your second question, yes, Opera is a far superior browser to Firefox (with a great e-mail client as well). As you can see, the Open Source God has been losing his steam with Firefox, where apparantly Mozilla will be only fixing 20% of Firefox’s errors in the next release (3.0):
http://blog.mildlyhotpeppers.com/internet/whats-happening-to-firefox/
And I don’t really need history articles, I think I’ve been involved in the field longer than you. My point was not that there are no Open Source units that are good: I agree I’ve benefitted greatly from Apache and Putty among others. I just moved to Arch linux from debian; so far it seems as it is “the” distro I’ve been looking for: simple like slackware, bleeding edge like Gentoo (also BSD influenced), with an excellent binary-based dependency checking package manager like Debian. I’m not an “anti-open source” person, in case you think that way.
In my professional activities, I find some people just like open source more because it’s GENERALLY on par in terms of quality with closed source equivalents (if not better), it’s free with no invasive EULAS, and allows software branching. And of course we all benefit from the extra documentation. Also, all the main open source operating systems have package managers that make life very sexy, like a whore who cakes on cosmetics (and I find whorishness sexy, see). It’s the religious supporters of OS that get me.
My point is that it’s stupid to create cults around open/closed source technology. Some people believe that software is good as long as it’s “free.” Obviously, a little analysis will show you that’s not the case.
Here is an article by none other than a friend of RMS, that gets my point across: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/
Some quotes from it:
“Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.”
“Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.”
“The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.”
at 11:33 am
@Pugnacious, Where are 100% innovative things in the world ? Everything copy, but successful copies are the things who do copying better + little something of their own.
at 6:07 pm
@pug I’m gonna patent the way I walk.So beware when you are walking. You’d probably be sued for copying my property. — Think wise man.
at 6:09 pm
@pug & please feel free to check IE’s UA string.
at 8:16 pm
@Pugnacious
You really miss the point.
———————-
Isn’t most Open Source software just clones of existing products, with a few changes to make them better, mostly borrowed from closed-source software?
———————
First of all we are part of the free software movement, the open source movement is a different one with different goals.
The MAIN goal of free software is to bring freedom to users. After we achieved this goal we care about adding more features.
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Firefox stole tabbed browsing from Opera, but there were precursors even before that. OpenOffice is an inferior copy of Microsoft Office.
——
Talking about “stealing software” could be misleading. If a proprietary software has a feature and we think its important, we add it but this happens AFTER we developed a free substitute to that software.
We consider OpenOffice better than MS Office beacuse OO brings freedom to users, MS Office does not.
If you think OO lacks some features you can develop them. We’re waiting for your code. :)
Free software movement cares about FREEDOM while the open source movement cares only about the “development model”.
The GNU project was born on 1984 to create a free operating system, to bring freedom to its users.
We think freedom is more important than technological enhancements.
at 9:20 pm
Open source is for Geeks. unusable.
at 11:25 am
@Pugnacious:
Hope you got the answer, ;)
at 1:30 pm
Well it would have been a great event I missed it so darely coz of ma exams. Thanks to FOSS n SLIIT for bringin in the geek to the land like no other. RMS would have loved Sri Lanken Wade I gues.. I’m a second year at IIT having great passion towards Web n Opensource Software.
at 11:27 am
We are from Moneragala and you can get more info thru our site
http://www.lakaruna.org
last week we experienced online training and it was a great event.
Please visit
http://www.lakaruna.org/online_computer_training/index.html
I hope your group will be arranging this kind of event to improve our knowledge of
Free Software Movement.
at 5:00 pm
Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I’m glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.
at 2:31 pm
I believe “Pugnacious” makes a valid point. Albeit not anti-Open-Source, some ppl got him completely wrong and felt the need to be completely defensive and call the army against him/her.
Let me share my experience with open source solutions. I once worked for a company (in SL) which used GNU C++ and came up with three very successful commercial products. It was wonderful. But we always deployed them on UNIX (Soalris and AIX) – the main reason being it was cheaper to propose such a high-end solution with SUN machines with Solaris or IBM machines with AIX than PC servers with Red-Hat. I am serious! We tried the comparison on two occasions and both times SUN solution was cheaper. So y’see at some levels (high through-put and high availability like 10,000 tps running 24 hours a day) we just didn’t have firepower to promote Linux.
Also at those high end solutions Apache could not scale to levels that IBM WebSphere did. I believe that Open-Source does need more corporate subscription to iron out the kinks. Someday they will become on par with so called closed-source.. but my feeling is they are not there yet.