VILLUPURAM: The pandemic did not stop this group of techies from the rural Villupuram to work towards software freedom, as the V-GLUG team began it’s weekly meeting to discuss about open software movement recently.
U Karkee, one of the founders of V-GLUG said, “Our weekly meetings will address the technical, political and marketing aspects of software freedom. The participants who mainly come from rural areas seldom have access to these ideologies.
We are aiming to educate rural youth on technical knowledge to compete in the contemporary digital era.”
D Haripriya, a software engineer told Express, “The awareness on using open-source software hasn’t reached people of Tamil Nadu but in many countries in Europe, China, and Ghana the freedom of using them are celebrated.
Dissenting against the domination of corporate companies in software industry is essentially our aim. We need to move towards a more free, liberated form of internet access. So, in our mission to take this message across techies and students in the district, we started our weekly meeting. The first meeting on Sunday was attended by about 35 students from villages.” The Villupuram GLUG (V-GLUG) is a team of techies who promote free usage of software in computers and smartphones, as a part of the global movement aimed against corporate giants that charge for their software.
These kinds of open-source software are transparent to users as the codes used to develop these software are open and accessible, which prevents illegal changing or hacking of codes unlike the licensed ones.
K Satish Kumar, another software engineer in V-GLUG, spoke about the politics of free software. Satish said, “The codes of the software sold by corporate giants are not transparent, so we can’t recode them with anti-viral codings. Hence, our money spent for it goes in vain and our system is at risk of bugs. Isn’t this essentially a daylight robbery? The voice against these companies will grow in future, as the internet is being accessed by 20 per cent of the total population in our country.”