Free Software

Zyxware has been carving for itself a niche in the local market as a trusted promoter and supporter of Free Software and related technologies. As the company has been growing we have been trying to figure out methods to capitalize on this brand value and in generating revenues and at the same time give back to the community.

Recently we had tried out Mandriva (at Zyxware), one of the many GNU/Linux distributions out there in the market. Like Redhat, Mandriva is also promoted by a company. However the userbase had been primarily European and the acceptance by the Indian community has been meager. I was shocked to see that there was no option 'India' in the list of countries in the Mandriva Live CD.

I woke up early today (relatively) to pick up Anivar Aravind from the railway station. I got there in time and picked up Anivar and took him home. We had breakfast and then sat down to get the press release to the media ready. By 12:15 we were not done and I had to go to P. A. Aziz College of Engineering to see if we could hold a meeting there this friday. I went with Prasad to the college while Anivar and Ashik, who had dropped by, worked on the Press release.

There has been a news item in AOL recently that Microsoft has roped in Mammooty for their e-literacy campaign in Kerala. It does not take a marketing guru to identify that their e-literacy campaign is nothing but an e-literacy campaign wrapped neatly around a marketing campaign for Microsoft products. I don't have anything against this and on the contrary I support similar marketing campaigns where value is given directly to the consumers rather than giving money to the media alone. However there is an aspect of deception in this Microsoft Campaign and this is what we the Free Software Community is protesting about.

I am part of a few Free Software communities online. I actively participate in a few, participate slightly in a few and watch and listen in a few more. These are random thoughts that came to my mind on improving the Quality of Service (QOS) of these user groups with respect to a member seeking service from the group, and am sharing this with everybody. This is a work in progress and by no means complete. Do suggest your tips if you have any.

We had organized and conducted our second seminar in an Engineering College today - at Mar Baselios College of Engineering, Trivandrum. The first one was the GLUG meet at Barton Hill. All the arrangements for the meeting including the permissions were done by Rajiv R. Nair and Manuel Jose of MBCET. Other members of the group including myself had to just walk in to the college and give our talks. I was pretty happy with the Barton Hill talk and was even more satisfied with the MBCET talk.

Today we had a meeting at Zyxware of a few members GNU/Linux User Group Trivandrum. We had a discussion on figuring out plans to organize awareness campaigns against the proprietary standard OOXML and to popularize ODF.

Recently OOXML sneaked through the back doors as an ISO standard. Yielding to pressure strategies from Microsoft, ISO members voted for taking OOXML as a standard. There has been wide protests across the world against this as there is already an ISO standard for documents viz the Open Document Format. The free software users group in Trivandrum is also planning to show solidarity to the community across the world in this regard.

Vishu is a traditional festival of Kerala. People wake up early on Vishu and try to see only auspicious stuff when they open their eyes on Vishu day. To facilitate this people noramlly keep auspicious (supposedly) stuff ready to be seen when they wake up. Since this does not apply to me I woke up very late today. I think it must have been the effect of three consecutive sleepless nights. If I don't get at least 6 hours of good quality sleep the succeeding day would inevitably be ruined. I would have a bad pain in my eyes the whole day and I would normally be listless and irritable. The long nights sleep was well due and I had a pretty good day.

Yesterday was one of the most exciting days of my life with Zyxware since the release of the Zyxware Health Monitoring System. The first publicly held GNU/Linux Install Fest in Kerala was successfully concluded yesterday. More reports on the event can be found on the GNU/Linux Users Group Trivandrum Mailing List and the GNU/Linux Users Group Trivandrum Website.