FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

In Bangalore, the FSUG-Bangalore mailing list (Free Software User Group) is planning a conference on the GPLv3, or the GNU General Public License, version 3. The Free Software Foundation global page has already announced that the fourth international GPLv3 conference is to be held in Bangalore, India on August 23-24, 2006 on this page itself. Further details are available here.

FSUG-Bangalore introduces itself: “Free Software Users’ Group (FSUG), Bangalore is a small collective of Free Software users and advocates in Bangalore. As a part of FSF-India’s larger efforts to apply Free Software everywhere, we work together to ensure that the concepts of Freedom and Free Software are more widely promoted, discussed and applied in Bangalore. You can more details about our activities on our web site.

GPLv3 is the next version of the GNU General Public License. Wikipedia introduces the GPL saying: “The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely-used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The latest version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a modified version of the GPL, intended for some software libraries.” As of 2006, version 3 of the GPL is being written by Richard Stallman, with legal counsel from Eben Moglen and Software Freedom Law Center.

Check http://feeds.goa-india.org/ for links about news from FLOSS in Asia. And if you know of more Asian mailing lists or websites that offer RSS feeds, do let me know. Thanks, Derek, for setting this up!

Check <a href=”http://feeds.goa-india.org/”>feeds.goa-india.org</a> for links about news from FLOSS in Asia. And if you know of more Asian mailing lists or websites that offer RSS feeds, do let me know.  Thanks, Derek, for setting this up!

Check <a href=”http://feeds.goa-india.org/”>feeds.goa-india.org</a> for links about news from FLOSS in Asia. And if you know of more Asian mailing lists or websites that offer RSS feeds, do let me know.

This is the website of the Open Solutions is Public Administration Forum is being defined as “work towards analyzing, and supporting the use of Open Data Standards (ODS) and Open Solutions (OS) for e-Government and Public Administration (PA) in the Asia Pacific region.” Check out the site. It has details of a draft agenda of a forthcoming conference too, to be held from October 26 to 28.

Conference themes include * Interoperability & Open Standards for e-Government Services * Public Procurement Strategies for Open Solutions * Implementing Open Standards in Public Administration - Global Experiences * Country level Strategies & Experiences - Asia Pacific * Adopting Open Solutions as Policy - Challenges & Strategies * Open Source Policy Implications - Total Cost of Ownership * Capacity Building Strategies for Open Solutions Deployment * Open Source for Learning and Education.

In case you missed it, here’s the blog tha tReba Shahid set up. Meant to be a group blog for journos writing on ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) in South Asia. Now the challenge is to get it going.

Had a meeting at the alma mater this morning. The Britto’s mailing list is doing fairly well. And there are some other other active (more or less) alumni associations showing up on the horizon too! It was decided to keep the name of the group as the Britto’s OBA (where OBA stands, obviously, for old ‘boys’ association).