HYDERABAD: He looks like a prophet, with his long grey hair and beard and intelligent eyes. In fact, in tech cirles, Richard M Stallman is hailed as one. The `Father of Free Software’ is in Hyderabad to oversee the migration of thousands of computers from proprietary to free software. RMS, as he is popularly known, will initiate the process of installation of an indigenous operating system (OS) called e-Swecha on 21,000 computers across Andhra Pradesh starting Tuesday in TRR College.
E-Swecha is based on the Debian OS which is a variant of Linux, the most popular open source OS. Unlike proprietary software like Microsoft Windows, open source software allows the original source code to be modified and distributed.
Thus the `free’ in free software does not mean free of cost but free to be improved upon and redistributed. E-Swecha was developed by the student community in engineering colleges in Hyderabad. Apart from students, this collaborative effort involved academics and IT professionals and has been in development for a year. The OS has been developed to meet the syllibi needs of engineering students. It has all the tools that engineering students could possibly need on a single platform.
The JNTU, which sets the engineering syllabus, has already taken the initiative to promote the usage of free software in colleges and has stood by its word by requesting for migration to e-Swecha OS.
Stallman, in an interview to TNIE, acknowledged India’s efforts to switch to free software (FS). ``India is fairly high on FS though much remains to be done yet.’’ Kerala took the initiative by switching computers in its public schools to FS due to the efforts of the Free Software Foundation of India, a sister organisation of the Free Software Foundation, founded by Stallman.
``Some schools in Karnataka and West Bengal have also swithced to FS,’’ he said but when asked what progress was being made in Andhra Pradesh, he retorted, ``the Government is not listening.’’