"[OpenDocument format is] our best chance to fight vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats" says Daniel Carrera, an active openoffice.org developer. An article on the Groklaw points out many such advantages and also has a funny introduction!

Quiz: Complete the sentence,"OpenDocument is ..."

(a) An open, XML-based file format.
(b) An open standard, supported by the OASIS and ISO standards groups.
(c)The default file format for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0 and KOffice 1.4.
(d) A top prospect for an official format for the European Commission.
(e) Our best chance to fight vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats.
(f) All of the above.

The correct answer is (f) All of the above.

The article also talks about a well researched report on how Open Standards could be used to create a more competitive marketplace (Valoris report). The report recommended adoption of an open XML format backed by a recognized open standards group.

umm, you may call it the "Ubuntu effect".  The simplicity of ubuntu tempted me to switch to GNOME.  That in no way means that I started not to like KDE or Qt.  Qt is my always favorite GUI development API and KDE is always the best in terms of its power - but, GNOME is simple and attractive.

Its been quite a few weekends since I used a weekend productively...
Last thursday when I was thinking of making a LiveCD that can be used to demonstrate a product, I felt dissapointed that neither Knoppix nor Morphix meets my requirement. Slax was close, but still failed to meet my requirements. Now its my turn to think of a new architecture for LiveCDs - My (It should be Our - bunny and manish with me too) LiveCD will inherit hardware detection from Knoppix and the file-system will be based on one of the existing BSD-Union style filesystem. The modules in our LiveCD will be based on the packages and not directories... Minor modifications in either of the existing LiveCDs will probably do. We will try this over the week or during the next weekend.

Thats it for this week :)

"India is ready for free software"
"Why free software is God's gift for India"

... and many similar articles talk about how India could be benefited by the Free Software.  I agree.  There are many more articles that talk about Indians in the software industry, but its dissapointing to see that there are a very few articles that talk about "Indians in the development of free software".  Everyone thinks twice before putting "India", "Free Software" and "Development" in the same sentence - Why?

Last year I read an article on this which said lack of internet penetration is the main reason for Indians not contributing much to the free software development.  This reason could have been valid a couple of years back... but now with good internet penetration among the computer professionals, penetration of internet  cannot be blamed.

"Why do you develop free software?  Its either to make money in some form or to be known to other developers.  In India you get neither.  Some other company or an individual takes your code and would publish it on their name.  There is nothing you can do about that from here".  This was what a multimedia developer had to say when I asked him about why he prefers to use proprietary software and develop proprietary content...  "How does proprietary software cost me more?  I use pirated software and the software I use meets my requirement" said the same person.  Looks strange, but this is how most people think like in India.

For anyone to contribute to the free software development, they need to be motivated - thanks to the 'very strict' copyright law in India many Indians are afraid of losing their identity and thanks to the piracy related laws, most use pirated software and are not aware of the costs involved in proprietary software.  There see no advantage of using free software and are not motivated to contribute to its development.

Do send in your comments...

Imagine this:
I unpack a new system, plug it in to get a cool menu asking me to select a GNU/Linux distribution to install on my system, I  select "Fedora Core 3 - KDE Workstation" and fedora gets installed on my system!

That is exactly what kept us busy in the last few days... Me, bunny and manish have managed getting various configurations/versions of fedora installed this way - kickstart over network :) For many others who do not want to install GNU/Linux on their system, but just want to try various distributions... the same menu also have many liveCDs running over the network. We already have Knoppix, Ubuntu Live, Mandrake Move, IndLinux Rangoli and SimplyMEPIS on our network - more to join soon!

BTW, UbuntuLive was awesome, a must try for those who still think windoz has a better UI.

A few months back, when watching the movie 'The day after tomorrow', I appreciated the creativity of the hollywood story writers... I thought, movie makers can go to any extent to make money. But now I change my mind - the nature can be more destructive than you imagine... it can give seemingly small waves enough power to overturn trains, break bridges and ruin the lives of a few million people. Its not easy to recover, but is not helping the victims recover one thing that we can do! Find channels in your organization to donate clothes, medicines and basic requirements and help the victims recover.