iLUG-Cal@ITWB.

4, Camac Street is the new destination of the Ministry of IT, GoWB (www.itwb.org) and iLUG-Cal was there on 5th April 2004 at 1000 hours to present its view on the 'GNU/Linux Paradigm'. In a 60 minutes session presided over by Dr G D Gautama, Principal Secy - IT and attended by various officials from the said ministry, Indranil Das Gupta and Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay talked on behalf of the iLUG on the various issues surrounding F/LOSS implementation.

The GoWB has for sometime actively exploring areas where full or part migration can take place. Thus, various interested stakeholders present their perspectives on the issue. The iLUG-Cal participated as the Special Interest Group involved directly during interfacing with the community-industry-government. The scope and extent of the session was fixed beforehand through discussions with Dr G D Gautama. These were:

[1] Why F/LOSS ?
[2] Where to deploy F/LOSS ?
[3] How to deploy F/LOSS ?
[4] The comparison of F/LOSS based systems vis-a-vis proprietary systems
[5] Value addition through F/LOSS - case study of L10n at www.bengalinux.org
[6] The common (mis)conceptions about F/LOSS
[7] The myths about GNU/Linux

The slide(s) used for the presentation are being made available for download from here. The slide notes however are not available for perusal right now.

The session also included an interactive portion where the participants voiced various views about the F/LOSS ecosystems as well as their personal experiences with GNU/Linux. This also led to an elaborate explanation ( and certainly one that both of us would someday like to put in print) about the nature of industry-community participation, the aims of UGs and the like.

The possibility of a future seminar was also discussed.

The Indian GNU/Linux Users Group - Kolkata would like to record its thanks and appreciation for Dr G D Gautama and Mr Tamal Sen (IT Promotion Cell) for making this landmark event possible.

- posted by sankarshan @ 4/07/2004 06:08:00 AM