Anivar Aravindcalls upon saner Indian community to write to BIS and ask them to stop adapting the proprietary standards of Microsoft. Open standards are the way to go. India shouldn’t fall into the trap of proprietary standards and go back to dark ages.

Boycott Novell Protesters Man-handled at National Conference on Free Software 2008

Here is blow by blow account of trouble that brewed up on the second day of National Conference on Free Software 2008 in Cochin university. The activists put up posters against the Novell Corp (the main sponsor of this event) at the Free Software exhibition complex.

A LITTLE INCIDENT which was mentioned at the end of March has ended more peacefully. Anivar explains why...

FSF India condemns the attack on free software activists who were criticizing Novell in a nonviolent and legitimate way.

Two of the FSF India board members, Dr V. Sasikumar and Mr M. Arun, joined other free software activists to protest against man-handling of peaceful free software campaigners. This protest was also stopped by authorities in an authoritarian and undemocratic manner.

A reminder of the fact that Novell is moving to India, just like Microsoft which gains more control there over government operations

Novell has undergone a major reorganisation in India.

Now that there have been at least three official appeals filed against OOXML, by South Africa, Brazil and India, as well as a letter of protest from a participant entity at the BRM over the way matters were handled in Denmark, I thought this might be an excellent time to take a moment and remind ISO of its published Code of Ethics [PDF].

In SCO's reply to Novell's appellate brief, it tells the court: Contrary to Novell's allegations, Santa Cruz "did not add any Novell copyright notices to," or "remove any copyright notices" from, the source code it acquired from Novell. In fact, it was Novell that changed the notices to add the Santa Cruz notice. (Id.)

Open Source is getting bigger by the day in India. Success stories such as Tamil Nadu going completely open source, NRCFOSS and CDAC launching Debian based BOSS Linux distribution tailored for India in many Indian languages and the recent steps by Gujarat State Education Board(GSEB) to give 50% weightage to Open Source and Linux in Computer subject across all streams (Science, Commerce and Arts).