http://www.helplinelaw.com/bareact/bact.php?no=05&dsp=copyright and especially the Offenses chapter is
http://www.helplinelaw.com/bareact/bact.php?no=05&dsp=copyright#chapter13)
. The crux of the argument is that stealing music is illegal, but providing tools that MAY be used to steal music isn't. CVR, the main guy
behind sarovar, is in consultation with his lawyer and figuring out what
he can do. FSF is also trying to figure out how they can help sarovar.
So what can people at ILUGD do to contribute to this fight. Here are the
points that were laid out
- A PR campaign has to be started so that this case is not swept under the carpet without a fight
- Keep money ready to contribute to the sarovar legal fund
- File a PIL
- LL will write about this topic on PCQ, LFY, HT, TOI
The next topic on the agenda was "Linux on Desktop" by Sirtaj Kang. However he was not here to demo the usability of a Linux desktop but to talk about inter operable desktops. He started by telling about the freedesktop.org and its mission (http://freedesktop.org/Main/MissionStatement) . The main reason for starting the freedesktop project was to have a easy to use message passing mechanism between various applications. The KDE project uses DCOP as its message passing mechanism and the GNOME project uses CORBA. DCOP is easier to than the CORBA technology and freedesktop hopes to bring a consensus between these two projects. He then proceeded to explain a bit about Kparts (http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kparts/) and how Konqueror uses this technology to provide a better user experience. I must point out that his talk was not as systematic as I make it out to be, it was extremely free wheeling. he talked about C#, Mono, XAML, Avalon too. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/support/lhdevfaq/default.aspx#Essential)
After this we had a round of money collection and some important announcements. An anonymous benefactor is willing to pay 25-30 thousand for the ILUGD kitty, subject to the conditions that the money is spent
on buying infrastructure for ILUGD. How the money is to be spent has not yet been decided and the people on the list are welcome to put forward
their ideas. The second announcement was about the flash supercomputer. The idea seems to have fizzled out as no one is taking the ownership of the whole project. The last but the most important announcement was the distribution of the t shirts.
Next on the agenda was the talk on Localization Nirendra Awasthi. He walked the audience through the steps of localizing an application. First you create a set of message strings using a po file. Next you compile the po file to get the mo file. The mo file is placed in the
/usr/share/locale/[LANG_CODE]/LC_MESSAGES/ directory. An application can
use the gettext library to get the message string based on the user's
locale setting. His talk was sprinkled with arguments about how India is
not doing enough on the Unicode front, how best to go about translating
the message string and generally how bad the whole localization scene is.
Ritesh Raj Sarraf next talked about the Debian philosophy and its key
strengths. The strongest points in the favor of Debian is the easy
package management and its debconf utility to provide a more user
friendly configuration tool. Many in the audience pointed out Debian's
weakness in coming out with the cutting edge software. Ritesh told us about the "testing " package set on Debian (called Sid) and how you
can use apt-conf to get the latest releases of your packages (If i am
wrong on this, please correct me because I am a rpm/tar.gz guy myself). It was also suggested to the LFY people present there to have the updates for Debian on their monthly CDs.
Next on stage was Ankur who wowed everyone with his swanky LILO background . For those who missed, a screen shot is here http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/xray-blue.html (but of course the live version was more awesome). He demoed his laptop running on KDE and a lot of eye candy. He was running Superkaramba on his desktop with a lot of plugins. Links of the apps he demoed are listed below
- The animated LILO - http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo
- Quickswitch - http://www.muthanna.com/quickswitch
- Superkaramba - http://netdragon.sourceforge.net
- Karamba Applications - http://www.kde-look.org
All in all, Linux on laptops are not that hard as they used to be. Ankur was working on Mandrake distro, just for the record.
After this, we had a vote of thanks for Mayank and Rahul (not sure about the Rahul's last name ) for providing space and hospitality for 30-40 people (are geeks counted as people?) planning world domination.
The party did not end here. We moved to Priya where we debated on how to spend the money that was going to come into the ILUGD kitty courtesy some anonymous benefactor. An idea that emerged was that we could hire out IHC conference halls for the meet. Another idea was we could then invite Ankit Fadia to deliver a talk on cracking and have a roomful of people to ILUGD meet that way. Yeah of course, we had hot chocolate fudge and chinese food too.
I do not have the list of people who attended. Whoever has it
(The Ankit Fadia part was a joke in case anyone missed it)
-- / \__ ( @\___ Raj Shekhar / O My home : http://geocities.com/lunatech3007/ / (_____/ My blog : http://lunatech.journalspace.com/ /_____/ U
_______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
