Event

Title: Software and Freedom

Speaker: Richard M. Stallman

Location: Tagore Auditorium, Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Time: 4 p.m., 20th October, 2006

"Free software is a fundamental requirement for a democratic and free society in which we are surrounded by and dependent upon technical devices." -- Eben Moglen.

Richard M. Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, which has contributed the most significant part of the GNU/Linux operating system. He is a scientist, a philosopher, a music-lover and musician, and a most passionate programmer. Amonst numerous notable creations and achievements, he has written the GCC compiler, the GDB debugger and the Emacs editor, and has been awarded four honorary Ph.Ds from universities around the world. Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to "share with their neighbor" and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use and this forms the basis for the Free Software movement. He is coming to Hyderabad to talk about the relationship between software and freedom. All individuals passionate about software and freedom, who believe that technological development is most effective when we collaborate with each other must attend this talk at 4 PM on the 20th of October to be held at Tagore Auditorium, Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Community to Community

Software Freedom Day in Andhra Pradesh is being celebrated on 28th of September. About 1000 programmers will work from different geographical locations to localise the applications in GNU/Linux to Telugu. This sprint is unique and first of its kind in the world where a huge number of passionate programmers will work on porting the GNU/Linux applications into Telugu. The slogan, "from the community to the community", is the spirit of this sprint.

Students from different engineering colleges, people working in the IT industry in India and abroad, school teachers, people from the media and from different sections of the society will participate to make the software available to the people in Andhra Pradesh.

The advent and growth of Internet is transforming the world into a global village. The Internet users of the world in 1998 was 2.49% which has increased by nearly 6 times to 16% in 2005. In India this growth is visible in the form of an increase from 0.1% to 4.5% in the same period. This shows a thrust towards the Internet usage in the Indian population. If we count this population in terms of the % of the world it is just 4.9%. Where as Japan and China are ahead with 8.3% and 11.8% respectively. This phenomenon is due to the existing language support in their languages. If we look at the web content by language, Japanese content is 5.9% and Chinese content is 3.9%. This content is effectively increasing every year.