There were few mails circulating around about his visit to India, which said he will be visiting RVCE, Bangalore on 13th Dec. So i started early that day to reach RV, expecting lot of people in RV(since it was saturday).
After traveling for almost a hour(around 18-20km), i reached that place. It was still 9.30(talk was at 10), security guards had no clue about this. So went around building to see some posters and even went near seminar halls, all were empty. So i went directly to Principal chamber, where i came to know its in NMKRV college, in Jayanagar. He gave his invitation to me. While coming out of the college i met few more guys, who came like me to this place. So we left that place, took some bus till Banashankari, then reached NMKRV around 10.50AM. But i was shocked to see this, since its just half km from my place also opposite to Lassie park which is our weekend adda. Amit(who i met in RV) had some phone no. of organizers. Seminar hall was pretty big, but bit surprised to see not more than 70-80 people.
My knowledge about Linux is not great. I just use it bit more than a normal user and till now thought Linus Torvalds has done a great thing by creating some thing like this, which can attract attention of today's youth. But it all changed after the talk.
Poster of the talk had heading like "Free Software, Free Society". This also said about the book release of RMS essays in Kannada. Since we were bit late, we did miss some introduction also RMS had already started speaking. He said about how he realized about the need which may arise in future for free software. He coated a nice example by saying "If somebody is drowning and i am the only guy who knows how to swim, then i'll do it until and unless the drowning guy is not Bush!!!". Talk went on with his initial hackings, time spent on writing the tonnes of lines of code. Also about a parallel Operating System which is similar to Unix. His initial struggle to come up with something like this was really inspiring. These guys(RMS with few others) started working FS(Free S/w) from 1983, but Mr. Torvalds wrote kernel in year 1993. He kept it as proprietary for a couple of years. So what ever the work did by RMS and others blended with this kernel to form a free Unix-like OS. This made Torvalds popular and he attracted a lot of attention world wide. Almost a decade of work done by RMS and few enthusiasts went unnoticed. Also he said about their efforts of coming up with their own kernel since 85 failed for many reasons. RMS insisted us to say not just "LINUX" but as "GNU/LINUX". If you are wondering(for not a Linux user)what about GNU is, then it stands for Gnu's Not Unix. ( Gnu is nothing but Wildebeest, which most of you would have noticed in NGC or Discovery, generally they will form a huge herd).
GNU started in January 1984 with a goal to develop "a sufficient body of free software to get along without any software that is not free". This was definitely an eye-opener for me at least, since i never bothered much about these stuff. The talk went on with many interesting things. Shockingly there are hardly 4-5 GNU/Linux versions which are free, i mean really free. The most popular distributions(Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu and many more) what we get in market are not free, i mean they have some proprietary programs for which source code will not be available, rather it will be lines of binary codes which obviously cannot be edited without knowing what they do. Few of the GNU/Linux versions which have complete source code are Ututo, Blag, Gnusence, Trisquel...
This later led to Q&A session, which had few interesting questions. RMS insisted to us read a lot and write a lot of codes and also said "Instead of God we worship Editor". After this there was book release, which had most of the essays of RMS and others transliterated in Kannada by a bunch of great guys.
I had a chance to be in a snap with RMS......
Two days later RMS was in mysore, talk was in SJCE. Came to know through Pavan that there were many enthusiastic students to attend his talk. This talk did impress me a lot. I also saw few snaps of RMS visiting some schools in Bangalore, where they are teaching GNU/Linux to kids. This is definitely a great development(which initially started in Kerala and now many schools in Karnataka too are doing this). Hope that RMS get more recognition for his work. Also more people gets involved into this.
Free Software Free Society
Super Man(junath)
