Boycott Novell Protesters Manhandled In India 360
James Mathew writes "This is an interesting story from Kerala, India, where the ruling Communist Party organized a national conference in its efforts to hijack the Free Software Movement, which has enviable roots in the state. They got Novell to sponsor it. On the second day of the conference, a few free software activists who displayed posters against Novell were manhandled by the organizers and police — typical of what is expected from them. Most of the snaps taken during the scuffle were forcefully deleted by the organizers, after seizing the protesters' mobile phones. Still they couldn't delete all. Here is another blow-by-blow account."
Re:Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing to do with FOSS/Novell ...whatever (Score:2, Informative)
Its like this...
1. The government organized some event
2. The government deployed police because there would be "eminent" people ( read "politicians") participating in the event, and need "security"
3. A firm sponsored the event.We all know what sponsored means, dont we
4. A group of protesters land up from no where, bad mouthing the chief sponsor
5. The government would be embarrassed if the protesters are not dispersed. After all, its the government, the mighty government, whose actions are beyond reproach, and who is above the law
6. The police disperse them the only way they know of : bash them up
Its just a govt organized event, which ran into problems, and the troublemakers needed to be dealt with.
If it were a automobile expo, and Toyota ( just as an analogy) were a sponsor and toyota detractors landed up, the outcome would have been same.Protesters being manhandled is nothing new here, and nothing unexpected either.
The country has simply moved from protesters being beaten up by the British government prior to 1947, to them being beaten up by their own elected government since then.
The are not hijacking FOSS, but using it (Score:1, Informative)
The government of Kerala are actually pretty big FOSS promoters. They include FOSS in the school curricula, have converted a number of government departments into FOSS-only, and the chief minister is quite pally with Stallman. The summary is complete bullshit - anyone with about 15 minutes to spare on Google can figure out the real relation between the government of Kerala and FOSS.
Most photos taken with digicams can be undeleted (Score:5, Informative)
There has never been a time in my life when some person of supposed authority have made any attempt to force me to delete photographs from my digital camera. Perhaps I am just not taking photos of important things. But should that happen I might gleefully comply if I didn't want to make a big deal about it.
Many digital cameras use VFAT filesystems which means their contents can be recovered. The utility of my personal choice is photorec(1). The photorec utility runs quite well on Linux. Just use /bin/dd to make an image of the SCSI disk to your HDD, run photorec with the device file as the parameter.
Photorec is written by Christophe GRENIER (no, I am not he) and can be found at:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/ [cgsecurity.org]
Re:BoycottNovell - the sad truth (Score:2, Informative)
A few days ago he wrote up a storm about all the journalists he estimated had been "bribed" by Microsoft
See the comments:
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/09/yardena-arar-bribed-by-ms/ [boycottnovell.com]
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/09/harry-mccracken-bribed-by-ms/ [boycottnovell.com]
This is the most idiotic thing I've seen there yet, and I've seen plenty (although I just subscribe to his feeds, maybe it's time to stop now).
You'll notice he didn't post a retraction or an apology or anything like that.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Informative)
This Slashdot thread is diverting the topic (Score:3, Informative)
The event was not organized by the Communist Party. Communist Party is promotting Free Software on several occasions and they have a good stand on Free Software. The event organizers are as seen here at the event site http://nfm2008.atps.in./ [nfm2008.atps.in] Some of the organizers were not having enough exposure to the Free Software world. That actually led to the situation of Novell being the platinum sponsor of the event. The whole problem is because of the igorance of the organizers on the subject. The organizers mishandled the subject without realizing the issue, as they have little knowledge about the issue raised by us.
Our concern was about Novell, and we wanted the general public to know the truth. For that we raised the posters telling them the reasons of boycott Novell. We didnot boycott the event. We did participate the event and tried to correct the organizers and tried to pass the correct information to the public. The organizers didnt realize this and they took their position with Novell due to their ignorance. and this mishandling of this issue caused the problems.
Anyway the organizers [nfm2008.atps.in] (CP(I)M is not among the organizers ) owe an appology to free software community regarding this.
I think the way slashdot presented the issue is misleading. This is not an issue between Communist party and Free Software people.
On behalf of the protestors
Shyam K
so how much of a hero are you? (Score:4, Informative)
Lesson for next time: Use a phone with automatic blogging so the photos are off the phone and on the Net before they can stop you.
"What's this? Where are the photos you took?" "You uploaded them to a website?"
Then you get to enjoy a free trip in the back of a truck to somewhere with a net connection, and then you get pushed in front of a monitor and keyboard and told to log in and delete the photos by men with guns.
Your idea is great in a country where the police won't threaten to shoot you. Even here in the US, if they don't like you enough, you'll "resist arrest" and need a trip to the hospital; it happened to a photojournalism student in Provincetown, MA when the cops didn't like him taking photos of them beating the shit out of drunks.
Why do you think NYC doesn't supply flashlights to the cops and banned its officers from carrying Maglites larger than 3 D-cells? It's because cops used them to beat the shit out of people...
Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:4, Informative)
If MONO is GPLed, then anyone can distribute it because the GPL gives them that right. Novell is the only one offering patent indemnification which isn't the same thing. MS has never claimed they would sue anyone for MONO if they distributed the source or got it from somewhere other then novell. It is nothing but FUD when people claim Novell is the only ones who can distribute something covered by the GPL. You are taking No more of a change with Mono then you would be from any other product. If some company decides they own a patent on the product and sue you, you hit regardless of using Mono or KDE or Gnome or Linux or BSD or GCC or whatever the person makes the claim about.
Hell, the GPLv3 doesn't even fix that. All it says is that if you know about a patent covering the product, you can't distribute it unless you can distribute a license to use the patent too. If a third party declares they own something in the produce or have a patent that coveres it, your in the same boat as any other license or Mono.
SW Patent Pact put Novell outside the community (Score:5, Informative)
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on [groklaw.net]. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal [groklaw.net] where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell [boycottnovell.com] and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono [infoworld.com] wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move [itworldcanada.com]. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside [practical-tech.com] the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like it's Microsoft licensed tech [thestandard.com] QUOTE:
So Novell/Microsoft use software patents to remove some/most of the benefits of OSS.
Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, they're idiots. They kill people who oppose them (Singur, Nandigram). Their so-called activists, burn, rape and pillage. I, a leftist, would choose the Congress Party of India over the CPM any day.
In addition, they have thin skins, criticising the CPI(M) is A Bad Thing. "Don't you have any respect? How dare you say something about such a respected party" No, fuck you. Lumpen crap.
Footnote: This is the case with most big things in India, the BJP and the Congress are no different, except that they don't hide what they are, and the Congress is a bit too wimpy to shut people up.
Re:Most photos taken with digicams can be undelete (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, I wouldn't comment on technology you obviously have no clue about. It makes you look like an idiot.
Hints: The wear leveling on the memory device knows nothing about filesystems. Wear leveling is invisible to anything using the memory device. "raw" access makes no difference because your still not directly accessing the memory. The memory device will not move stuff around or change anything if you don't write to it (ie. if you delete stuff and don't write to it again then the deleted stuff will most likely still be there; but this is similar to normal storage anyway).