ILUG-Cochin

Press Club Programme

March 15th, 2009

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Date : 14^th March 2009, 2.15pm – 4.15pm
Venue : Press Club Ernakulam
Attendance : ~25
Audience : Journalists, Reporters, Press Academy Students,
Free Software Community Members

Press Club, Ernakulam had organized a workshop on Free Software for the people working in Newspapers and other Media ILUG Cochin was invited to handle the workshop by the Press Club, Ernakulam. This in fact was due to the good relationship maintained by the group with the people in the Media.

Free Software Movement by Jay Jacob

The session started by talking about the Freedoms that form the foundation for principles of Free Software. The speaker explained with examples the concept of Free Software and how the community worked together to create technology for the benefit of mankind.

The talk turned towards the history of the Free Software movement and about Richard Mathew Stallman, the founder of the GNU Movement. The speaker then explained the series of events that lead to the birth of GNU/Linux.

The importance of Freedom was explained by comparing the situation to “India’s Struggle for Freedom. The audience were subscribing well to the important aspect of the speech.

The talk then explained the basic copyright concept and how the copyleft concept created by the Free Software movement helped protect the Freedom of users.

As the talk was winding up, lot of questions we raised, especially on Licenses, copyright, sharing and distributing free software for money. The ambiguity in the term Free as in Freedom was also clarified.

Demonstration of a Free Software Operating System : Debian GNU/Linux by Sreenadh

The demonstration started with the basic login screen of the OS. The speaker touched upon the basic aspects of a Free Software Desktop Environment . He explained the fundamental concepts behind a Desktop Environment He then proceeded to explain a few basic applications for daily use belonging to the following categories:

Internet: Iceweasal, Pidgin,Empathy
Multimedia: VLC, Totem, Kino
Office/ Productivity: Openoffice, Abiword
Desktop Publishing: Scribus
Graphics: Inkscape, GIMP

There were lot of questions on using Malayalam with OpenOffice. The speaker explained the answers in a very efficient manner, thereby satisfying the audience queries.

Free Software in Schools and Malayalam Computing by Sanal Kumar Sir

Sanal Kumar sir touched upon the importance and relevance of teaching Free Software in Schools. He talked extensively about the present level of implementation and the problems faced. He delved deep into how the community can find solutions for the issues faced and how they can effectively work with the teachers to improve the present curriculum so that it can bring out the true power of Free Software.

The speaker next explained the importance of the Malayalam language and how free software and projects like “Swathanthra malayalam computing” have enabled the language to reach leaps and bounds. The talk also touched upon the possibilities of Malayalam blogging and how the Internet was a new arena that was allowing the language to expand its horizon.

Concluding Session

The concluding session saw Sameer finally explaining the name change of the group and the vision and future of the group. The press club secretary thanked the ILUG Cochin Members for their cooperation with the Media and concluded the session.

ILUG Cochin thanks Anand Haridas of “The Hindu” for having taken the initiative to bring the Free Software Community closer to the Media by conducting this event, and hope that more events of this nature happen in the future.

Participated ILUG Cochin Members

Sreenadh
Binny V A
Jay Jacob
Sanal Kumar
Kevin Sha
Sameer Mohamed Thahir
Hari
Bilal
Prinson

Binny V A Activities Cochin, meeting, press, programme, report

September 2007 Meeting

October 6th, 2007

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Details of the September Meeting

Date : 23/09/2007
Time : 2:30 pm
Location : Jays Internet Club, Broadway, Kochi, Kerala

The Meeting started late because heavy rains prevented the attendees
from reaching early.
Before the meeting started the Members talked about the group
and the free Software community in general. This was for
the purpose of a newspaper reporter who had come
to participate in the meeting and do a writeup on the same.

One member expressed his view for the purpose of the
reporter that the existing FOSS implementation of the
Kerala government should not be seen as a political
initiative ( although it may/may not be in reality ) but it is
actually important concept that needs to be implemented
at the educational level in order to facilitate the
spread of knowledge in the IT field.

Introduction and Agenda

The Meeting as usual started of with the customary Self Introduction.
During this One of the attendees talked about how he started his
FOSS journey by implementing it in a school and how he overcame the difficulties .

One of the members commented that the Agenda Needed to have been GNU GPL v3.

The Moderator started the talk on Agenda.by briefing about the actual purpose of the GPL
and how it relates with Free Software.
How it helps protect the Freedoms of Free Software users, through a legal
binding knows as the license.

How the GPL v2 was designed for a time when there was no Linux Kernel
or a totally Free OS and how things were totally different back then.

How a new version of the GPL was necessary now.The main imortant aspect of the GPL v2 was the copyleft.
The concept of Copyleft was briefly explained.

The following important differences of v2 and v3 were
highlighted:

Use of term propagate and convey instead of copy and distribute
for the purpose of internationalization.
Inclusion of two more licenses as compatible with gpl- apache and eclipse license.
Clauses opposing tivoization of free software. Hence software used with tivo cannot be gpl v3 compatible.
One member raised a question about nokia and motorola hardware platforms using linux
and whether the phenomena can be described as tivoization.
The patent clause in the gplv3 that reflected the microsoft novell deal.
protecting users in such situations.( successor to the liberty and death clause of gplv2.).
Clauses against treacherous computing.
Clause stating source code will only be provided on network.
Clause relating to termination of license.
Protecting users freedoms from anticircumvention laws like DRM and EUCD.

One of the members, highlighted the fact how certain
drmd dvds were not playable with free software multimedia players
and how gplv3 tackles software that deals with drm

To conclude the moderator asked the other members two questions relating to the agenda:

Should the linux kernel adopt gplv3?

The members discussed on the topic although no conclusion was reached.

One member commented that the developers are given more responsibility in the gplv3 in order to protect the freedoms of users.

Another member commented that the software should not control the platform on which it works.

Will the gplv3 still help make better quality software?

A few members commented that irrespective of the gpl version the quality standards will remain uncompromised.

One member spoke out on how the gplv3 will become a long
term protection for free software developers, especially in terms of patents.

Presentation

After the conclusion of the agenda discussion, a video showing RMS talking at the launch of the
gplv3 was screened.

After the tea session there was a class on “basics of python” by Balakrishnan Sir.

The class started of with the History of Python.
The class covered the following aspects of the language:

Builtin Data types
Numbers
Strings
Sequence lists
Tuples
Dictionary
String Manipulation

The concepts were demonstrated using a basic program.

Sir also showed us how we could access the python help from the python shell or by running pydoc and using a web browser.

The class was received well by everyone
even though most of the attendees were not having a programming
background.

Concluding Session

In the concluding session, as usual members were asked for their
valuable suggestions and feedback, with regard to the GPL v3 discussion one member suggested we have a brief follow up to the same in the next meeting apart from the Agenda.

Also the members were asked to try out some programs in python, and ask doubts on the ML or in the next meeting.

The members were also asked to volunteer for conducting the demo/presentation in the next week. Reju Rajeev came forward and volunteered to do a demo of a GNU/Solaris installation.

The meeting concluded by 5:45 pm.