Well , there have been too many people trying to prove me wrong and this had forced me to come up

with this line by line defense of what i said.

As of now 3 people have tried to prove me wrong. And i will defend myself against all of them
Here are the color codes I'll be using for each of the authors who have replied.

Black : Stuff I wrote

Blue : reply written by Akshay J rao
Red : reply written by Vikram Vincent
Gray : reply written by Praveen.A
Green : My defense

/* [I don't expect this article to go beyond the mods desktop. If at

all it does then the mod may remove this header.] */

I am glad it came out of the mod's desktop!!! :)

I do not believe that this is group is moderated because we believe
that users use their freedom with responsibility.
We don't moderate posts. We believe every member will moderate himself
and we trust them.

Great! Never thought people would accept criticism, that was why I thought it wouldn't leave the mods
desktop.

Today we had a seminar on Open-source Software and Embedded systems.

So I went there and to my utter dismay felt so bad that I even felt
like hating the open-source community.

on the first note, there is some difference between Open Source and Free Software,
here we had a Free Software Meet

I thought it was Swathanthra Tech Fest, probably you came for the
wrong meet or you had wrong expectations.

I wondered if I had got the title of the seminar wrong, I checked it out with a lot of friends and all said
the same thing “the seminar was on open-source software and embedded systems”. Moreover when
your volunteers invited us to the seminar; I clearly remember them saying “please come to this seminar
on Open-source software and embedded systems, It will be quite useful to you guys”. I can get a large
number of people as proof for this. I tried to get a copy of the Printed Invitation for the seminar but
they had all vanished .

I know that the open-source community is made up of a few geeks and

extremely dedicated people . But the ones here where neither they
were just normal people thinking that they were abnormal and failed
miserably to pull out the cap.

hmmm, we need to think seriously over this matter! and if you have the patience to reply, please can
you tell who did you refer when you said "But the ones here where neither"
We are normal people in the community and we believe we can make a
change fro the better.

No Comment

So they started speaking as usual and then they go to the part on Ip

rights (Intellectual property Rights to be precise) and as usual
Basmati and Turmeric comes to the fore ;they start saying that the
Americans have applied for patents to these substances but when we
look closer the people who applied for these patents are hold your
breath Indian- Americans(INDIANS living in America). So what do you
say about these a**h***s who call themselves indians ??

well i have reacted to this point of bringing in Basmathi and turmeric. well COmments about Indian
Americans, i am not the one to do that! it was wrong on their part (i feel) well but thats not more
important here!
First, I was speaking about patents. There are huge differences
between patents, copyrights and trademarks and these three
incompatible issues are wrongly coupled together as IP.

Second, the patents are not in the hands of those Indians there but in
the hands of the Monopolistic Corporations that had hired them.
As a matter of fact, 90% of the patents are owned by Corporations and
90% of them are based in the US.

When the Britishers, French, Portuguese, others came to invade India

they used the gulliability of individuals and groups to "divide and
conquer" us.
Now again the policies of the present and past governments are not in
the interest of the majority of the population but only in favour of
the rich foreign and Indian Corporation. Thus are ideological
opposition to Monopolies.

Vikram had already explained it. It is the companies which, the

Indians work for, owns the patents. Copyrights, patents and trademarks
are different issues and has to be treated separately, please don't
club them together as intellectual property.

I used IP(Intellectual property rights) in the sense that it meant the deep rooted Knowledge of our
ancients and Not in any other sense. This article on turmeric might interest you (click here). I know the
British ruled us but when i look around everything I see is a remnant of their rule. This may sound
Blasphemous but it was because of them that our culture survived. See what the Spaniards did to the
Mayans and Incas. Vikram may be a communist opposing all Large companies and corporations which
keep out middle men and get stuff at low prices to the General public.( I have never had a soft corner
for communists).
And then they talked of WALMART coming to India and how it will
displace the local shopkeeper. Just give it a moment ; how can
Walmart give goods at a very low price which the shopkeeper can't ?
The fact is all the extra money goes into the shopkeepers pocket as
extra profit . So if you are buying something whose MRP is Rs100. You
pay that much to the shopkeeper but when you buy it at walmart you pay
Rs70/- and that I feel is goog for the people . Walmart is only going
to bring down prices by a good management skill and this will help all
sections of the people . I still don't know why people are worried
about a shopkeepers profit ?? he'll always find a way to make more
profits.

I agree this was an unnecessary point that was brought out!

First, I request you to please study the conditions in countries which

have already experienced the conditions that India is now
implementing. Example Indonesia, former Bolivia, former Venezuela,
former Brazil, others... and then analyse the policies with respect to
India.

Now a business analysis: Tell me who will get a bigger discount, a

small shopkeeper buying around 100 units of some product from the
Wholesaler or a Walmart buying couple a million units of the same
product directly from the Producer at a throwaway price???

Walmart's profits is in the multi-billion dollar figures.

Walmart's profit per minute.
http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy/2005/03/walmarts_profit.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2190877.stm

Now think of this, Walmart comes to India and sells a Rs.100/- item
for Rs.30/- They do this for a year. The small shopkeepers numbering
lakhs will not be able to do the same. They will just die of
starvation and Walmart will get complete control(monopolistic control)
of the Market. Now that they control the Market they push the prices
up to whatever level they want. This is not my hypothesis but what has
been studied from the examples of the above mentioned countries.

That is why we emphasise on the healthy competition.

Why should we care about the shopkeepers and small business???
Because we are a community where we believe in "one for all, all for
one". Now this is *not* regionalistic or communal or language-based or
such petty issues because we pride ourselves to be a global community.
One that works for the common good of the society than for the good of
a few pockets.
Again see what Vikram wrote about it.

First of all, thank you Akshay for being with me on this.

The earth has never remained stable without a change, if it did that you wouldn't be here. There has
been only one law that has defined our existence “Only The fittest survive”. Just because Walmart will
send stuff at a cheap price and still make profits doesn't mean that Everyone else will sit quite and die
out, someone will come up with an innovative method to tide over it. It will be a win-win situation to
all. People will get stuff at cheap prices and the shops will find newer ways of attracting people. I saw
the stats from the 2 sites referred and the stats are wonderful, has off to Walmart. Our PDS(Public
Distribution System) is being hit by the corrupt aided by the traders , if a company can establish a sort
of a PDS system for all the it should be welcomed which was I did.

And the next part of the talk was on languages , the orators seemed to
be critical of C, JAVA the foundations of modern programs and went
on to demonstrate a new language called Perl and Python (by a
separate orator) . These seem to have borrowed heavily from JAVA .
Python is a lot similar to JAVA in the sense that it is interpreted
(You don't get executable code you get a byte code that is
interpreted on the go by a runtime environment) but there was no
special mention of this at all.
Everything that was demonstrated could have been done by creating a
new method in JAVA . Python seemed to be a simplified version of JAVA
with some major methods being renamed so that it looked good . And
Perl doesn't even have libraries . You must download them form the net .
Moreover JAVA is getting open-sourced this year . Sun will be
releasing the source code before this year So i don't understand what
the attack on it was for .

well the main aim of BMS LUG is to provide opportunity to explore new horizons, i guess these
session were aimed at providing the insight to the other options available to the users/programmers.
we don't force any one to use what has been taught. it is up to the user to decide on the best option!
also, it is generally the mentality of any speaker to put forth the advantages/features of any thing he is
speaking about, hence ,i completely stand by having these sessions,

coming to Perl libraries to be downloaded, a lot of necessary functionalities of Perl are available on the
first installation, Perl has a plethora of libraries, and it is not really advisable for a first timer to have all
of them available at his disposal. If i am not wrong , the same holds for Java,
to give you an example, the Java Media Framework has to be downloaded and used to write
multimedia based apps (this is out of my limited knowledge of Java i 'm telling )

I would like to put forth, for example , there is a library that provides implementation of OpenLDAP in
both Java and Perl, and how appropriate would it be for a first timer to have them installed and figuring
how to use it, when he is not familiar with the platform?!!!
Java is getting open sourced, if you dint know the Java Library sources are available as of now, so it is
already open sourced, again we had a Free Software fest, and not open sourced!
If you attended the 1st session n ideology and philosophy, you would have got a perfect idea about the
difference between Free Software and Open Source software.

well one more thing, this was mainly aimed at first time users/ prospective developers, If you were
neither, then i guess you were disappointed by the sessions.
We shall let know the group members about the technical sessions that happen in future, you could join
us and give in your inputs!

Perl isn't a new language. You have not heard it before doesn't make it new.
What is wrong with that? Java borrowed the concepts of Object Oriented
Programming from C++ and eiffel. And if you look closely the syntax is
borrwed from C.
Why do you think it has to be compared to java? Is it because you are
a big fan of java? And you can get the executable code if you want to
(see http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) and many of the GNU/Linux distributions
ship a natively compiled version of eclipse.
haha. It could be done in any other language as well what is special
with java? It could have done easily with C#, why don't you use C#?
Java compiler and virtual machine are already available, only the
class libraries are yet to be released (that is because some of the
parts are not owned by Sun and they need to re implement those before
they can release it as Free Software)

There was a particular reason I had to cite Python and Perl , as I had written earlier the Speakers were
critical of C and JAVA , they stopped short of calling them rubbish and that was outrageous. These are
the languages on which Unix was re-written and which sort of created the foundations of the future
languages. Perl was born as a document editing language which evolved into a full-fledged language.
They went about saying as if they were the only good languages and everything else was bull-shit, that
was why I cited JAVA, a language which evolved from C, C++ . I have no grudge against any
language, all of them are great in their own sense and this point was completely missed by the speaker.
Python is a must to write scripts for Blender the 3D equivalent of Maya. And the hacker from Britain
who got into NASA and the US defense systems used Perl to write the program he used for the hacks!.

I am not a new user of Linux. I have used LINUX sporadically over 4 years. With the first installation
being a Red Hat Linux 6.0 ,
And followed by Red Hat 9.0 and then Mandriva 10.1 recently. I have been a great fan of Linux and
Open-source in general. One more thing I use the word Open-source more than the word Free-software
because, free will never be free while open source can be free. If it's open-source you know what the
program does if it's just free you never know what it may do :)

And then as the stuff progressed people started walking out out of
boredom; a full audience at 10:30AM had become a half a classroom of
students by 4:00PM this was mainly due to boredom created by the
speakers of earlier sessions .
Also the audience were promised CD's containing the latest releases of
some popular distributions which never came through.

the CD were distributed outside the seminar hall as far as i know! If you have not recieved it, you can
contact me i shall get you one asap. :)

Actually I don't have a need for the CD's, i only mentioned it as a passing comment. I get live and
bootable DVD versions of most of the popular Linux distributions free on PC World. :) :)

There was no concrete reason given for people to migrate from Windows
to the open source LINUX except the awesome graphics which would come
up only with the installation of a new file called Beryl
(http://www.beryl-project.org/). Minus Beryl there was no reason to
migrate to Linux. If they were to have mentioned that it was possible
to run all my favourite programs from Windows on linux and also be
able to play all those awesome games i can on XP and Vista on Linux
there is no doubt a large number of us would have shunned out XP then
and there.

the entire session was aimed at providing the user an over view of the opportunities available in Free
Software world, its up to the user to realise that and migrate, as said , we are not forcing any one to
switch over. moreover, the day's session did the job of introducing the user to the world of Free
software. Gaming i am not the person to comment! as i am totally not into it!
Running the fav programs, well you can run any program that runs on windows on Gnu/Linux OS

Haha. You make a very good point here. We are not yet at the point
where we can compete with Windows on *certain* aspects.
That's why we in the Free Software community emphasise on the
"Swatantra" aspect else people will join for the wrong reason and also
dropout for the wrong reason.

You could have given enough points asking people to switch over to Linux. As you may/may not know
most of the people who use Windows usually go for the pirated copies distributed among friends which
is illegal . Intead of doing that they could easily go in for something open-source, about which
everything is known and is moreover free.
You could tell them that they can run all their favorite applications and games on Linux
[http://frankscorner.org] .
They get a fairly good video player and everything that windows could give is present by default or
could be added in a jiffy making it as good as windows.
In short everything that can be done can be done on Linux too.
The point that windows programs can run on Linux itself would have attracted a large no of followers.

This is for the gray stuff, we Indians will never accept or discard anything unless you are forced to.
Unless you force people they'll never accept a change
In the end maybe because the seminar had exceeded the time table it
had set ( the chart said that there would be some debian release
party at 3:00Pm ;there was nothing of that sort even at 4:30Pm when I
left the place ) everyone were asked to move out of the AC hall into a
classroom
where talks went on about the bogging problems in open-source about
how a large no of projects are stalled with no new brains to run them.

Schedule went over time yes, to certain extent, as far as what i know, some of the session went more
than the time allotted because of some discussions involved! may be those discussions did not interest
you!!

There weren't tooo many discussions and most of them weren't forced by the real audience

Out of more than 150 thousand projects just a thousand of them are
active . What a dismal state of affairs in open-source. So much for
open source.

On a scale of 5 stars , i would give a rating of 2 on behalf on all my

friends. More over no one collected the feedback forms in the end !!

On a concluding note, just out of interest are you a GNU/Linux user? if not, you may try once before
telling "There was no concrete reason given for people to migrate from Windows" you definitely
wouldnt know what an OS has to provide if you have never used it! Use it and you will know the
reason! :) thats how most of us got into this wonderful world of Free Software.

thanks and regards,

as said earlier I have been a Linux user for a fairly long time and I love it and like to see it spread
beyond the computers of the 160 people making up this group.

[this is strictly my own opinion and I can't help it if i've hurt you]