Thu January 1 1970 There are indications that the government is again trying to bring software patents, possibly covertly. The first indication of this has been in the draft Manual of Patent Practice and Procedure published by the Patent Office, India, in which they talk about "software per se" and software in association with hardware. This was repeated in the meet ...

Thu January 1 1970 Free Software has been advancing in many regions of the world, giving freedom to computer users. Though we hear an occasional news about somebody going to migrate to Free Software, we never realise the extent to which people have migrated. It is interesting to take a look at all the migrations over the last few years and see to what extent GNU/Lin ...

Thu January 1 1970 India has decided to vote against Microsoft's OOXML file format being accepted as an ISO standard in the meeting of the committee convened by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). Out of 19 members of the BIS committee, five did not attend the meeting, five voted in favour of OOXML and the rest (eight) voted against.

It is interesting t ...

Thu January 1 1970 This is good news for the Free Software community and for a lot of others. A US court of appeals has decided that a number of patents on software and business practices are invalid. This decision has wiped out much of the patent portfolios of many big companies, though this does not mean that software cannot be patented in future. According to th ...

Thu January 1 1970 India is considered to be the Largest Democracy, where Largest denotes population. And Democracy is supposed to mean, traditionally, a government Of the People, By the People and For the People. I would like to examine whether this is really so.

How do we ensure that the government is really of, by and for the people? The means adopted ...

Thu January 1 1970 This is an interview with Sri C.V. Radhakrishnan, founder of River Valley Technologies and the person who brought TeX and Free Software to Kerala, that I did some time in 2007. It was published in the December 2007 issue of Linux for You. Here it is:

LFY: We understand that your company River Valley Technologies is doing business using ...

Thu January 1 1970 Microsoft has responded (see here) to my write-up about the need to adopt the Open Document Format. As may be expected, they are just trying to convince people with propaganda. Since Infochange is unwilling to publish my response to Microsoft's clarification, I have to do it h ...

Thu January 1 1970 It is after a long time that I am able to write something here. Had been rather busy and also rather tired. :-)

This is something that I have been wanting to write about for some time, but have not been able to. Since this blog is called "Free as in Freedom", I thought this is the right place to write about it. As you must have guessed, ...

Thu January 1 1970 Recently, the Indian Express published a report where allegations were thrown at Kerala State IT Mission and SPACE and also at Arun, who currently works for KSITM. SPACE prepared a response to the report and it was published by the newspaper in the Letter to the Editor column. I personally believe that what t ...

Thu January 1 1970 An Interview with Richard Stallman
(This interview appeared in Frontline, Volume 26 - Issue 04 :: Feb. 14-27, 2009 under the title "Liberating Cyberspace")

Richard Mathew Stallman needs no ...