Here are the presentation slides from one of the most interesting talk I attended in recent times. The lecture titled 'On right to decode and encode and copyleft politics' was delivered by Dr.Nagarjuna at recently concluded National Conference on Free Software in Kochi.

I last booted Windows on my year-old laptop on October 8, according to my SETI@Home stats. I hadn't realized my conversion had been so complete, but over the course of the last few months, I found myself in Gates World less and less for fewer and fewer things.

"Radical militant librarians are out to destroy the music industry. Or at least, that’s what you might come to believe if you listen to the RIAA’s arguments. The recording industry and other corporate lobbies have convinced policymakers for decades that intellectual property protections are necessary to motivate the production of creative works.

"THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Minister M. Vijayakumar inaugurated the website of the upcoming international conference ‘Free Software, Free Society’, here on Thursday..."

"Patents are short-term monopolies (20 years) designed to give inventors sufficient time in which to recoup their R&D costs and turn a profit. Open source turns the 20-year patent term into two years, if that. As a relentless, ever-growing competitor, open source keeps the proprietary world in check and on its toes to a degree that the industry has never before seen."

"Just as the three quarters of oil engineers now agree that Peak Oil is in sight within the next decade (after that, oil production can only decline), can we also posit that we may have reached a moment of Peak Hierarchy, a moment in history in which it is no longer large centralized organizations that are most efficient or productive, but rather those that are organized as distributed networks an

"Indymedia and the Enclosure of the Internet [...] There has been controversy recently on the global imc-communication and imc-tech lists over the issue of a $200,000 grant application sent to the Knight Foundation by IMC Boston to do Drupal development work for Indymedia sites. The grant application was blocked by IMC Rosario in Argentina.

There is a frustrating phenomenon that I notice amongst many technology enthusiasts and general users, the conditioning to pathetically expect new progress from the software companies. All too often I see someone claiming to be a fan, asking, pleading, begging, wishing, warning or even threatening any software company so that they would implement a feature that they wish for.