Philosophy

Today at 4PM 14 people met together in a comfortable room at the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and employment (SPACE). These were people who came together because they wanted to see how they could contribute towards fighting unfairness and injustice in the world. These were people who came together because they felt that they could do something about it.

If you have worked with Free Software at some point of time in your career then you would definitely have come across this question from some quarters. How does Free Software work. Although it is theoretically possible to make money with Free Software not too many people are doing this. That is because quite a lot of people work for Free Software because of what Free Software is and because of the community behind Free Software. I am presenting here a graphical representation of the Free Software Ecosystem.

If you have not read Google's corporate mission then here it goes - 'Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'. The way they had set out to doing this was to initially offer a very powerful search engine that made the world's information available at everyones fingertips. Now they were making money by guessing people's preferences based on the content they search for and by showing them relevant advertisements and acting as a shrewd marketing agent. Well they didn't stop there.

I am a strict believer in the philosophy of the four 'R's - Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle. The story I had written a few days back about the death of a dear friend is proof for this claim. For that matter, that is not even the friend with whom I have shared the longest of my friendships :-). Humor aside the point is that it is possible to practice this philosophy. It might be a little difficult initially but it is just a matter of making up your mind.

Most people who have some idea about economics would have heard of the malthusian law of diminishing returns which states that the marginal increase in production decreases as more of the contributing factor is used in production. But I am very confident that nobody has heard of "the law of diminishing efforts". That is because it never existed until now.

When you work in the software industry, either in the services sector, or in the products sector, you never get to see the harmony, the cooperation and the amiability that, you find in the Free Software Community. I am not claiming that, it is all friendly, harmonious and amiable, but you get to feel it very often, and in quite a lot of communities, and when you do, it is bliss. I had earlier written on the monetary aspects of Free Software development. Today I will share one of my personal experiences in getting a feel of the bliss mentioned above.

Yesterday I had a long conversation with my cousin Thomas who is running his own firm in Bangalore (Stylus Inc). We normally have these long cousin-cousin talks once in a while, where he would closely enquire about happenings with Zyxware and share his contextually relevant experiences in building up his firm. Yesterday we discussed about the vision behind and mission of Zyxware and he impressed upon me the need to get it out in the public.

I am an aggressive advocate of the policy of trying to be in control over ones own life. Absolute control over ones life is a myth as man is a social animal and there are too many interdependencies and too many external parameters that he cannot possibly be in control of. Buy my philosophy is to take control of at least those parameters of your life which you can possibly control. You can never get in complete control over your life but you can control it to varying degrees depending on your circumstances. There were certain areas of my life that I was under the impression of having been in complete control over but which proved to be not so.

I normally don't give up on anything that I set my mind upon. I don't always succeed in everything I do but I almost always give my best shot in trying to do the things that I want to do. I have been following this policy, ever since I started thinking on my own and taking decisions on my own. I have also been advocating this policy to people I know and meet in business and to prospective entrepreneurs.

I am an ardent advocate of the theory that people should follow their dreams and passions than just follow orthodox conventions. I believe I have been doing that myself and I try to promote anybody who I think is doing that. It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure to see people try that and succeed in it. One of the excuses I hear from people is that they have made wrong career/educational choices and that they are stuck with their choices. Oh no I don't, neither does one of my friends - Jeoraj Stanley George