I recently had the opportunity to be at GNUnify - a Free software festival. The guest of honour was the GNU man himself - RMS. I was present on Sunday the 16th February where most of the invited talks were held.
There have been other reports on GNUnify, so I'll concentrate only on the Mumbai GLUG's contribution. Names may have been changed, no disrespect is meant by this. The day started out with Dr. Nagnurjuna telling us why we should use Free Software, and dispelling some of the myths that have been spread by persons with other agendas. His contention that changing from our current operating system to GNU is no different from the changes that we have to make every two years to start using a new version of that OS is sound. Nagarjuna tends to flavour his lectures with a lot of humour and it was quite engaging that day. Especially funny was his comment about changing word processors: "We changed from WordStar to another word processor called Word Perfect, and then to another word processor called Word, and then to another word processor called Word, and then to another word processor called Word...". I overheard RMS commend him on this point too. Nag also had a three stage IQ test during his presentation. In the first case he asked the audience if they knew who was responsible for certain inventions/discoveries in science. He next asked people if they knew who had written certain Free Software projects (linux, emacs, gcc, perl, python), and finally who had written certain Proprietary products. Everyone got the first two correct. Later in the day Prof. Jeetendra Shah - or should we call him Freetendra Shahftware? - delivered a talk on the use of Free Software in education. He spoke primarily about research done by Seymour Papert in the use of computers to enable education. This is different from using computers to teach children. While the latter uses the computer to program children, the former lets the children learn by programming a computer. The talk was particularly interesting for me because it deals with my area of research. He spoke about how Free Software could help us achieve this goal, primarily by building different scenarios for people from different backgrounds. He also demonstrated Freeduc and distributed 25 CDs of the same. He suggests that every school should have one of these CDs. Jeetendra Shah was quite active throughout the day urging people to come forward and support other projects too, like IndLinux. The final attraction was RMS' speech. Nagarjuna introduced him, although it sounded more like he was reading out his own death warrant. He said RMS was not a person, and then followed it up by saying he's history. At that point RMS was ready to strangle Nag, if it weren't for the large number of people watching. There were several Mumbai Gluggers in Pune over the weekend. I'm told Nirav gave a lecture on PHP on Saturday. I wasn't present for that. I also met Gurpreet Singh - who's been on the receiving end of my list policing on more than one occassion. He made some insightful comments during Prof. Shah's presentation. He's requested me to post the usenet etiquette here, so I'm going to do it for the last time ever. It's now up to younger chaps to take the initiative. http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20021125/007711.html which refers to: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html I'd also post a link to Eric Raymond's article on tuxedo.org, but can anyone get to tuxedo.org today? Well, if anyone can, it's at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Oh, yeah, the list search engine is at http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/search/linuxers Philip -- When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her. -- Sacha Guitry -- _______________________________________________ http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
