Sunil Mohan Adapa’s Blog

There is an article at law.com titled “Open Source Software Shows Its Muscle”. It has been quite some time I have seen a close to 100% pure FUD article. So, I decided to write something in reply.

1) “a round of lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) against for-profit companies using the software for commercial gain”

This shows that the author either has no understanding of Free Software principles or is maliciously trying to portray a bad image. Free Software community or Software Freedom Law Center has never objected or disliked companies for being for-profit. There are many for-profit companies that are considered a integral part for Free Software ecosystem.

2) The article is written to sound as if the “muscle-flexing” is recent activity. Free Software Foundation (FSF) and SFLC have been fighting GPL violations for a long time.

3) “For-profit companies using open source software should take notice and understand the risks.”

3.1 - The author fails to notice that using any software has risks in this exact sense. Every software (except one’s in public domain) come with a license agreement from the copyright holder and violation of copyright agreement is always a “risk”.

3.2 - The companies that SFLC has filed cases against are not companies that have simply “used” Free Software but built proprietary software with code from Free Software projects violating the terms GPL.

4) “The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users.”

If you read the GPL it will be very clear that GPL is trying to protect the freedom of the users of the software from companies that abuse it to turn Free Software into proprietary software. Whenever the companies take Free Software and turn them proprietary, like the companies in question did, the freedom of the users for software is hurt. This is despite the intention of the original author of the Free Software that his/her software users should receive all the freedoms that he granted. It also against his will that no one who wishes to deny this freedom to other users shall build software using his/her Free Software.

The newly added clauses in GPL v3 against patents, tivoization etc. clearly protect the freedom of the end user to use the software. Not to mention the additional advantage that many for-profit companies that “use” Free Software would get from these clauses.

5) “You are not free to do whatever you want with the open source software and may find yourself in a legal fight if what you do restricts the freedom of the software.”

With GPL, the user is free to do anything also long as he does not deny the same freedom to other users. Which I believe is completely fair.

6) “Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software’s freedom”

A company simply “using” Free Software for business activity is in no way restricting freedom. Further, there are many companies to prove that businesses can be built around developing Free Software without restricting users’ freedom.

7) “and the growing use of open source software by for-profit companies has been a growing irritant for free software advocates”

This is a baseless accusation. The community has been cheering the steady raise in the use of Free Software.

The rest of the article contains lot more FUD, but I feel its too pointless to continue.

Update: I meant accusation not acquisition.

So, I decided to move out of Gmail. I am not moving to Yahoo or any other commercial-they-own-your-data company. We’ve had our own server space for some time now at medhas.org. I simply installed RoundCube on my server in about 20 minutes and configured it to use my hosting provider given mailbox. I will slowly move all my mails to this account (thanks to Google for letting me to that). I shall be asking people to use sunil or bunny at medhas dot org now and not sunilmohan at gmail dot com.

RoundCube offers only basic stuff and is still very much in development. However:

1. Its Free Software and I know what it is doing with my mails.
2. I own my mails and all my data, truely. No evil entity or its AI machines are invading my privacy.
3. No ads on my face when I look at my own content.
4. Nobody is going to automatically subscribe and log me into new services that I don’t want/like.
5. I know php well enough to add my own features to it and I am indeed planning to contribute to the project if I find time.

Like many others, I’ve noticed a lot of things over the past few months of Google doing that are definitely evil. Here is the latest one:

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web (The New York Times)

Saying that the deals are not exclusive is not an excuse to what they are trying to do. They will take the works for millions of people for free and use it for their commercial advantage and not allow everyone to freely have it. For God’s sake, those are public domain books. I see two ways now

1. Say No Thank You to Google and a few years (even if it is 10 or 20) years down the line projects like Gutenberg will eventually do the task with volunteer support. We waited more than 80 years for them, I am sure we can wait more.
2. Hand over those books forever to the commerical advantage of a single (or a few) company in exchange for immediate access to digital content.

Many who do the wrong thing do not feel the guilt,

but everyone who consciously chooses to do the right thing feels the pleasure.

I wrote another article to the Prajasakti Telugu daily newspaper. In it, I have described problems with using non standard encodings on Indian language websites and solutions available to the users and content providers to convert the content to Unicode.

Unlike other articles I have posted, this one is tomorrow’s article today

Recently, I talked at a session to faculty and students of Vignan Engineering College, Hyderabad as a part of two day workshop on Free Software Technologies. I used Fedore Core installer as a means of explaining fundamental concepts like partitions, boot loader and user accounts that are a necessity for installing any GNU/Linux distribution. You can download my presentation slides (as ODP or PDF) which consists mostly of screenshots from OSDir. I demonstrated the installation process and using GParted LiveCD. After my session others have demonstrated the Ubuntu LiveCD.

I wrote an article on GNU General Public License to Prasakti Telugu daily newspaper last month. I did not write the introduction to it and I do not like it.

Sometime back, I gave a tutorial to branch managers at a divisional office of Life Insurance Corporation of India. The tutorial included basics of email communication and word processing in OpenOffice.org Writer. OpenOffice.org tutorials are not in plenty and I spent quite some time deciding the topics for the tutorial. Here is a list of topics I covered in the tutorial.

I went to my home town and there I helped a buddy install GNU/Linux onto his laptop. Even these days, you sometimes have to tinker with configuration files to get things working. So, I thought I should write it down.

Network card - No special configuration required. Goto System->Administration->Networking and specify the IP address manually if your network is not configured for automatic setup via DHCP.

Video card - No special configuration required.

Synaptics touchpad - No special configuration required. Synaptics driver is installed and Xserver configuraiton file was added an input device with synaptics as the driver.

Wireless lan card - For installing the drivers, there is no additional effort required. ipw2200 module was installed and automatically inserted.

Wireless configuration with PSK/TKIP encryption: The following configuration is required. First do:
iwscan list
This will give you a list of all the wireless networks scanned by your wireless card. Note your network name and then, using it, run:
wpa_password "your_network_name" > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
This will prompt you for the password. Here enter the password that has been set for you wireless network by your network administrator. This step will create the file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and write some barebore configuration into it. You need to edit this file and add more configuration to it. It should finally look like this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="your_network_name"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
#psk="your_password
psk=a_hexadecimal_key_that_is_automatically_generated_in_previous_step
}
Now, run the command:
/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i eth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd
Here eth1 is the wireless network card’s interface. Check that it did not give any errors. Once this step is successfully done, you need add this to your system so that this happens automatically everytime your wireless network is setup. Edit the file /etc/network/interface to make it look like this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
pre-up /sbin/wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dwext -i eth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp


Most likely, after configuring your network devices from System->Administration->Networking you just have to add the two lines starting with pre-up and post-down to the wireless networking intereface.

Wacom stylus eraser and cursor: All the configuration in the Xserver is done automatically only that wacom driver did not get inserted into the kernel automatically. To load this kernel driver everytime the machine boots, add the following line to /etc/modules:
wacom

Update (Sep 3rd 2006): The command for getting the list of available networks is not iwscan list. It is : iwlist scan

I attended the Workshop on Internationalisation conducted by W3C-India office at Noida on 3rd and 4th of August 2006.

The workshop was organised by the W3C Indian office. CDAC and Department of Information and Communications Technology (MIT) are the major participants in the W3C Indian office. W3C works on setting up standards like HTML, XHTML, XML, DOM, CSS, MathML, SSML etc. W3C Indian office represents India in W3C, collects requirements specific to India in W3C standards and contributes to W3C standards in general.

The two foreign attendees to the workshop from W3C were from the W3C internationalisation workgroup. Their 6 sessions during the 2 days of the workshop focused on explaining the current status of internationalisation provisions in W3C standards and specific issues that are related to India that they were currently aware of. Their expectation of the workshop was to collect more issues related to Indian languages and specific rules for solving the issues recognised.

Unfortunately, most of the other presentations and discussions in the workshop were off-topic and repetitive. They included talks on introduction to localisation and internationalisation in general for
software applications (and not the web), machine translation, optical character recognition, corpus research, linguistic issues, speech recognition, speech synthesis research (but ignored SSML, which is more relevant in terms of standardisation!) and the internationalisation capabilities of IBM and Infosys.

Major contributions to the core issue of the workshops came from CDAC’s W3C-India language teams at Noida, Pune, Kolkata and Trivendrum. These teams have worked on issues with W3C standards, including the upcoming CSS3 standard. They have indicated issues with vertical text, justification of text, list style types, first letter drop-caps, etc., which is the kind of stuff that the workshop was meant to discuss.

However, the question of whether the standards have been comprehensively analysed has not been answered. The second day has seen discussion on international domain names and their implmentation in India (for .in TLD) by National Informatics Centre (NIC).

My Participation:

During the panel discussion, I pointed out the lack of effort to propagate W3C standards in the Indian web community. The major problem facing the growth of Indian language web today is the use of proprietary fonts and encodings to build websites. This is halting the progress of standards like Unicode. Further, Indian language websites are crippled and user cannot search the site or content in Google, participate by posting comments etc.

Yet, the W3C office whose major participants are CDAC and MIT have not taken steps to encourage the use of Unicode or other standards. Some government websites even use proprietary encodings. CDAC has not released its fonts under a proper license and thus killed any prospect of letting the publishers switch to Unicode using their fonts. Not just in the case of Unicode but government sites lack a commitment to even basic standards like HTML. For example, presidentofindia.nic.in is not following W3C standards. I have asked the attendents of the workshop to have deep commitment to follow standards and also encourage the use of these standards in the rest of India.

I also met a lot of people who are likely to help or work along to achieve common goals.