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The Hindu Stallmans message and movement, however, do find resonance among the younger lot on campuses, where over the past decade, several GNU Linux User Groups or GLUGs that distinguish themselves from the technology-focussed LUGs have come up. Photo: Special arrangement

Its been 30 years since software legend Richard Stallman typed a short missive informing the world about his plans for the future of software: Free Unix!.

On September 23, 1983, he started work on GNU a recursive acronym for GNUs Not Unix a UNIX-compatible software system that was free in the truest sense of the word.

As Stallman would later go on to describe, the freedom wasnt just about the cost but about the freedom or liberty to run, copy, change, improve and distribute the software. In short, it took the control of software production from the hands of big business interests and gave it to users. The battle, as Stallman would continually emphasise, was as much about ideology as it was about technology.

Thirty years later, open source software is all around us be it the widely-used Android operating system or variants of Linux that run your servers. But, free software, is still far from reality with the cloud and software as a service models constantly making users surrender controlover their computing, as Stallman puts it, in his post this week.

Even in Bangalore, much of the activity around Linux is more in the realm of open source movements. Linux user groups are popular among professionals, and short courses that train technologists on Linux platforms earn good money.

Stallmans message and movement, however, do find resonance among the younger lot on campuses, where over the past decade, several GNU Linux User Groups or GLUGs that distinguish themselves from the technology-focussed LUGs have come up. These GLUGs are technology-focussed groups that collaborate closely on free and open source projects, organise seminars on technology and are near evangelical on using and working on Linux. A few GLUGs have even managed to convince private engineering college managements to migrate entire laboratories, that were earlier deeply entrenched in a proprietary ecosystem, to free software systems.

Says Prabodh C.P., assistant professor, CSE department, the Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, and a free software activist: GLUGS are a great way of exposing students to a world beyond books and tech theory. The idea is to enable students have a peer-to-peer learning approach, where they come together and learn together, like a common interest group.

Mr. Prabodh explains that though the GLUGs start out learning new technologies together, as the group matures, typically the technology sessions expand into looking at the ideological roots of free software and why it makes sense.

A lot of it also inspires students into activism, he explains.

The rest is here:
Setting code free