Kerala - Kochi

State to set up international centre for free software

— Photo: Vipin Chandran

Espousing a cause: CPI (M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury speaking at a session on ‘global financial crisis and its impact on IT sector’ at Cusat on Saturday.

KOCHI: Hundreds of free software activists from across the country joined hands to share their expertise in the field at the second national conference on free software that began at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) campus here on Saturday.

Education Minister M.A. Baby inaugurated the event. In his inaugural address, the Minister said that Kerala was the first Euro-Asian region to fully embrace free software. He said that the State has achieved commendable gains in expanding the usage of free and open source software.

“Through a government decision, we have made it mandatory to use free software in Kerala’s school curriculum.

These initiatives have resulted in conducting examinations for 16 lakh students using the open source platform,” Mr. Baby said.

Stating that broadband connectivity was ensured for all high schools in the State, the Minister said the State was moving from IT education and training to ICT-enabled education.

He said that the Department of Culture has already decided to donate the contents of the Malayalam encyclopaedia to Malayalam wikipedia.

The Department of Information Technology has also decided to set up an international centre for free software in the State.

“I hope that our honourable Chief Minister will make the declaration [about the centre] tomorrow,” the Minister said.

Praising the scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for the success of the Chandrayan project, Mr. Baby said the country has joined the fraternity of four nations which had achieved this fete before.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury has urged the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to implement the proposals given by the Left parties to save the country’s economy from the current global financial crisis.

Delivering the inaugural address at a plenary session on ‘global financial crisis and its impact on the IT sector’, Mr. Yechury said that a newspaper had reported that the Prime Minister had given in writing all the proposals of the Left that he had rejected earlier, as India’s suggestions at the G-20 summit.

“Come back to India and implement the proposals. We are not taking the credit, but telling you that if you have done more on what we have said, the impact would have been less,” he said.

In his keynote address on the occasion, Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac said that democratisation of science and technology field has become an integral part of the class struggle.

He said that the struggle to make information technology free from being a private property has become a political struggle.

Pointing out that the full potential of science and technology revolution cannot be realised unless there is a change in the system, Dr. Isaac said that a realistic picture of getting out of the current global financial crisis might evolve only by 2011.

In his message telecast at the venue using the video-conferencing technology, V.R. Krishna Iyer, former Supreme Court judge, said that free software has ended the monopoly of multinational companies in the IT sector. He said the common people had every right to communicate using free software. “Free software is going to have a new world that will produce lasting peace for the entire mankind,” he said. Gangan Prathap, vice chancellor of Cusat, A.M. Yousuf, MLA, Y. Kiranchandra, convener of Swecha, an organisation promoting free software, G. Nagarjuna, chairman of Free Software Foundation of India, Joy Job Kulavelil, syndicate member and general convener of the event, and K. Babu Joseph, former vice chancellor of Cusat, spoke.

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