'Til All Are One

The pen­guins are on the march in India. It’s won­der­ful to see the states of Ker­ala and Tamil Nadu tak­ing their future devel­op­ment ser­i­ously by adopt­ing free soft­ware on a wide scale. My par­ents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their fam­il­ies still live there. Some of them have been involved quite con­sid­er­ably in edu­ca­tional and com­put­ing pro­jects, which have unfor­tu­nately been based around Win­dows. This doesn’t help any­one in the long term (apart from the vendors con­trolling the lock-​​in), so it is ter­rific to see them work­ing towards some autonomy and freedom.

P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a cen­tury old. Howzat?!

Update: On the con­verse, we have abso­lutely appalling con­duct in the so-​​called ‘developed’ world. How can a demo­cracy func­tion when the mech­an­isms of gov­ern­ment are hid­den behind pro­pri­et­ary data con­structs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to pub­lic inform­a­tion over to cor­por­a­tions that have zero account­ab­il­ity to the popu­lace? Even their so-​​called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.

Happy feet /​ ‘Til All Are One by Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan is licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-​​ShareAlike Aus­tralia CC BY-​​SA AU licence.