Passion4Freedom
Passion4Freedom is a Freedom in Technology Supporter and Developer Network(FTSDN). It has started it’s journey from the city of joy Kolkata in India. The FTSDN works for combining the student power with the libre soft development. With a goal of creating an environment for rapid devlopment and support of libre soft, this network is growing fast. We ask all libre soft enthusiasts to join the group and thereby the movement. We ask all the tech people from India to join us to get a taste of freedom. In Passion4Freedom.
Why do we exist?We, the Free Software Movement Team having been consistently working to build the Free Software Movement in India, have decided to consolidate our efforts by forming an organisation. Our work has been built on the work of the pioneers of Free Software in the country.After much deliberation, we have decided to name our organisation the ‘Passion4Freedom’ to symbolise the all inclusiveness of the Movement. What differentiates us from other groups, organisations or networks is our approach to building the Movement. Our scientific understanding is that only a ‘mass movement’ in the FOSS domain can bring about the various changes that we envision. To build such a mass movement, a democratic, transparent, representative and dynamic organisation is essential.
We understand that to address the various challenges before the Free Software Movement it is essential to have broad based coordination among the various entities operating in the FOSS domain, in conformance with our principles. It should be noted that we are not affiliated to FSF-I or any other entity, at present. We represent the Free Software Movement. Prof Eben Moglen and RMS have been our inspiration.
The Convener is Abhradip Mukherjee(9231443728) <abhradip@freedomnetwork.co.cc> and Jt. Convener is Bhaskar Roy (9748290302) <bhaskar@freedomnetwork.co.cc> & Rituparna Mukherjee <rituparna@freedomnetwork.co.cc>
This core team is supported by a group of academicians, people from the industry and students.
We present the ‘Passion4Freedom Network’ http://freedomnetwork.co.cc http://groups.google.com/group/tp4f
What is a mass movement?Mass movement is a word which comes from geology. It is the geomorphic process by which soil, regolith, and rock move down slope under the force of gravity.
Mass movement can be over varying timescales from seconds to years.
Mass movement may occur at a very slow rate, particularly in areas that are very dry or those areas that receive sufficient rainfall such that vegetation has stabilised the surface.
It may also occur at very high speed, such as in rock slides or landslides.
We aim to be a MASS MOVEMENT in FREE SOFTWARE
We would like be a group of hacktivists – who can be catalysts in reaching the idea of free software to a large number of people – including the people who don’t have hardware – by giving them free hardware to start with.
Whether the mass movement in free software in India is going to be rapid or slow – is going to depend on You Waking up to the philosophy of free software.
Why Call it a Network? We, the people in Passion4Freedom, from our long experience with free software movements have understood that it becomes tough for small user groups to sustain for long. This mainly happens because usually students form user groups and students do not remain in the college for his/her whole life. When the batch interested in FOSS goes out of the institution, the User Group there fades away through time. To stop such unwanted situations, we thought of an umbrella network which will connect the user groups and hold events together. This will be effective in the sense that even if a institution has a week user group, it can benefit from the network’s activities with the help of existing stronger user groups.
Why Free Software Movement?
As the computer continues to become increasingly pervasive in our personal, social and working lives, the soul of the machine — software — is seemingly trapped in a battle of proprietary ownership.
In the early days of computing, it was customary for programmers to share software. Since the 1970s, however, much software has become proprietary, such that its users have been prevented from sharing, let alone modifying, programs. By the 1980s, proprietary software had become commonplace, and the computing community was losing the freedom to cooperate in using and altering software. Freedom was under attack.
What is FSF?
The owners of software had erected walls to divide us from each other.
Those words came from the one person who has zealously campaigned to safeguard software freedoms–Richard M. Stallman, a celebrated programmer and an accomplished hacker. (Contrary to popular belief, a hacker is not an anti-social being. S/he is someone who is passionate, even obsessive, about programming, as opposed to a cracker, someone who breaks security on a system, often with malicious intent.)
Stallman, then working at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, left to pursue the Free Software Movement in 1984, inspired by the ideals of American independence: freedom, community and voluntary co-operation, which leads to free enterprise, free speech and free software. He had already started the GNU project in 1983 to develop the free operating system GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix).
In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs.
The FSF promotes the development and use of free software and free documentation. In particular, FSF promotes the GNU operating system, used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant, based on the Linux kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. These systems are often mistakenly called just `Linux’; calling them `GNU/Linux’ corrects this confusion.
The FSF (http://www.fsf.org/), whose headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, is a tax-exempt charity for free software development. It raises funds by selling GNU CD-ROMs, T-shirts, manuals and deluxe distributions (all of which users are free to copy and change), as well as from donations.
The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. The FSF believes that free software is a matter of freedom, not price.
FSF-India
The Free Software Foundation of India (FSF India), the official Indian affiliate of the FSF, was formally inaugurated by Richard Stallman at the Freedom First! Conference at Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala on 20 July 2001.
FSF INDIA will be the national agency for the promotion of the use of free software, i.e. software distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) or other licences approved by FSF, in all domains.
Abhradip Mukherjee is a member of FSF-India working group but it should be noted that Passion4Freedom is not affiliated to FSF-I at present.
Partnerships
Passion4Freedom is a
SUN Microsystems Associate Partner
Novell Community Reseller
Ubuntu MarketPlace
Schoolforge Member
DFD team