Govt told to use more free software

THIRUVANTHAPURAM: All public institutions, including State governments and the Central government, should publish the license conditions of software they use. This was recommended by delegates to Caturanga 2002, the annual conference of the Laboratory in Informatics for Liberal Arts (LILA) of the Mahatma Gandhi Antararashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, held at Technopark, Trivandrum on September 8, 2002.

Thirty-two delegates from all over the country, representing academics, artists, mediapersons and computer scientists, attended the one-day conference, which was held just after TUG 2002, the annual meet of the TeX Users Group. This is the second annual conference of LILA, the Informatics Division of the Mahatma Gandhi Antararashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, which is a Central University. The first conference, Caturanga 2001, was held last year at Pune.

PG Nambiar, son of late Mani Madhava Chakiar, a famous Koodiyattam artiste inaugurated Caturanga 2002, whose theme was the philosophy and practice of free software. Ashok Vajpeyi, Vice Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi Antararashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, said that free software is a cultural intervention that reminds of certain values that never went silent in India but which are perhaps being overwhelmed by the contemporary reformulation of India.

Wagish Shukla, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi pointed to how countries that want to progress are switching to free software in the public sphere. He mentioned countries like UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Austria.

It is a mistake, added Shukla, to assume that copyright protects or benefits the artist. Very few painters, musicians, actors or writers make money and patents prohibit the spread of knowledge and should be regarded as obstructions to civilizational advancement.

Satish Babu, Regional Vice President of the Computer Society of India, talked on how free software can creatively cope with the various paradigms of intellectual property rights. John Plaice, Professor at the School of Computing Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia, explained how the free Omega typesetting system can be used for multilingual text processing, including for languages using the Devanagari script, which cannot, at present, be done by proprietary software.

Alexandre Gaudeil of the University of Toulouse, France analyzed the economics of free software, and the problems and prospects of locating it within the existing legal environment. At the concluding session of Caturanga 2002, delegates recommended that training in computing should not include teaching of proprietary software at public cost. Delegates also recommended that cultural performances should be treated as educational software, and made available for download on the Internet.

They also suggested that efforts to localize free software office suites like GNOME should be speeded up. To aid the development of computing in Indian languages, there must be a social and cultural audit of localization activities that are funded by public money, delegates said.