“From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.” The above is often given as the socialist credo. However, it is much older than socialism. It actually appears in the Bible in the book of Acts, describing how the early church functioned. It also describes how Linux functions. What they both have in common is that the Bible and Linux are parts of a larger socialist plot.

FREE SOFTWARE activists fear that the Marxists are trying to hijack their movement in Kerala.

The CPM- led state government recently sacked two proponents of the movement, who had formulated the state's information technology policy based on free software. This follows attempts by the CPM to form networks in Chennai and Bangalore in the name of free software, but strictly under party control.

"In 1984, Richard Stallman founded a social movement known as the free software movement. The free software movement fights for the ability to control our computers as a cooperative community (as opposed to being under the rule of software proprietors where users have only as much control over their computers as the proprietor allows).

"..RMS’s other mission here is to promote the Free Software Movement. The creator of the GPL...is at pains to correct misunderstandings of what the term free software means and to draw a distinction between it and the open source movement.

Charles Robert Darwin is famous for his theory of evolution by a process which he termed natural selection. Today we are going to attempt to stretch Darwin’s theories to cover software as well.

"...Who will control the technology that controls our lives? Free software can be understood as an answer to this question: An answer in the form of an unambiguous statement that technology must be under the control of its users. When free software triumphs, we will live in a world where users control their technological destiny. We simply cannot afford to fail..."

Free software is ubiquitous. It runs everywhere on (almost) everything. The question that dominated most of the discussions at the Libre Planet Conference in Boston about a week ago is what now? How can the community capitalize on its achievements to make the movement more inclusive and reconceive the relationship between free software and privacy?

"...Java is the new COBOL, whaaaat?[...]I believe that the 'Java is the new COBOL' is a politically correct way for saying "Java sucks"[...] I have been reading a lot about Richard Stallman, the free software advocate. He has one central theme that he uses to defend his free software movement; free software is not about the developers, it is about the users.

"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.