What is FOSS? Why FOSS?

FOSS is ‘Free & Open Source Softwares.’
After reading about this, the question arises : What does this ‘Free’ means? and What is Open Source?…

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Why Should I Use Linux?

We have curiosity about life, we want to know things..Remember when we were child, or just watch a child playing with his/her toys…

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BJP uses Open Source Softwares

This is a very good move by Bhartiy Janta Party in India, that they have started using Open Source Softwares in their party office.
source: http://www.linux.com/feature/150549

Even they have decided to implement wi-fi connectivity & IP video telephony for their offices. They are using ubuntu desktops in their Delhi headquarters. I was in Delhi with my friend Amit from 3rd to 9th Jan, that time we heard of this news & planed to visit BJP office, we even got permission to visit the office using some of Amit’s contact, but at the last moment there was some urgent meeting in that office & due to security reasons we could not visit the office.

But i must say Mr. L. K. Adwani’s IT-consultant is a wise man, who has saved a lot of software money for BJP. Also they have got better quality softwares than proprietary ones.

With this BJP has surely one step ahead of all other parties in catching attention of IT community of India. I am a Linux user and i frequently get a link to Mr. L K Advani’s website whenever i am accessing mails related to FOSS or Linux, from my google account (sponsored link).

I think, each and every political party in world should take some tips from Mr. Obama to make effective use of internet for gaining popularity over internet. I am looking forward to see all the political parties in India start using & promoting FOSS.

Here the list of softwares used by BJP :
(ref: http://blog.arpitnext.com/2008/10/bjp-using-foss.html)

Function	Chosen software
Server Virtualization	OpenVZ and Vtonf
Router + Firewall + VPN	Vyatta
Unified Threat Management	Untangle
HTTP Accelerator	Varnish
Proxy Server	Squid
Digital Repository	ePrints
Email	Qmail, Courier Imap and Squirrelmail
Instant Messaging	OpenFire plus Spark
Video and Voice Telephony	Asterisk, Hylafax
Mailing List	Ezmlm
Security Camera Management	ZoneMinder
Identity Management	Fedora Directory Server
Web Content Management	Joomla!
Remote WAN-based Backup	VZDump and rSync
Storage Area Network	OpenFiler
Network Management	Zenoss

Linux For Education

Linux is the best thing to be taught to kids while they are into schools. Specially children between 5 to 18 years.

Linux is very logical in operating, has very meaningful GUI. But still people find it difficult to use Linux.. Why?? The reason is they are habitual of using Windows for years, they expect certain buttons & windows at certain places which is many times not at all relevant.

KDE has taken a step forward to this & has launched a education project “The KDE Education Project” (http://edu.kde.org/). Ubuntu also has “Edubuntu” (Educational ubuntu http://edubuntu.org/) as a special distro.

Here parents, teachers, students can use the softwares, copy them, distribute them, modify them & thus make most use of the IT. Modifying & distributing the software increases confidence of all of them, plus it is good diet for brains of children. This does not kill the curiosity of kids in their early age by not modifying the code & playing with it very roughly..

In India, Maharashtra Government has made a very wrong decision by making a course MS-CIT compulsory for all government jobs. With this they are helping a company to build their brand which is of no use, also the course fees & royalty to the company is another issue.. Instead they should have gone for Open Office which is a Free & Open Source software, much more powerful than MS-Office.
All of you do have a look at “Edubuntu” & “The KDE Education Project”. Edubuntu has a Gnome GUI whereas KDE project has a KDE GUI.

But both the products are amazing & very useful for students.