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.

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

BIOS should be Free Software. The rush for it is ever greater with big hardware companies doing all the nasty things like Treacherous Computing.

AMD vs. Intel was always a close pick for me with both of them appearing equally nice or evil. AMD always won because it turned out to be a bit cheaper most of the time. These days after the 64-bit race and the dual core race I was considering evaluating both of them again. However, AMD just got a big plus. It supported the LinuxBIOS project by co-operating with the developers. Intel did not do so. So I will undoubtedly choose AMD for its a matter of who controls my computer: me or some big US company.

Support the FSF campaign for a Free BIOS. Pick AMD, write to Intel about your decision and annouce your support to bios@gnu.org.

I wrote to Intel and said this:

Dear Intel,

Being a software engineer, I take software freedom very seriously.

Intel has not been cooperative with the LinuxBIOS project which aims
at creating a free BIOS. AMD has been coorperative. I shall pick AMD
CPUs and other products over Intel for this reason and will also
actively pursue my collegues to do so.
(http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html)

Please reconsider your stance.

–
Sunil Mohan