Proposing FSCIConf as a more Free Software aligned national conference
Pirate Praveen Mon 29 Sep 2025 12:42PMPublicSeen by 113Many of us in the community felt IndiaFOSS is more aligned to Open Source philosophy (from the selection of talks and focus on products more than philosophy). So we would like to have an event that highlights Free Software philosophy - the idea of users controlling the software as a community, instead of developers building software collaboratively.
Why the philosophy matters?
You can think of the difference in both philosophies similar to the story of blind people describing an elephant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Both philosophies describe the same software differently - they focus on different aspects. In Free Software, users Freedom is primary goal. For Open Source, creating better software is primary goal.
What this leads in practice is different types of responses to some challenges. One good example to illustrate this difference is TiVo, which allowed recording TV shows and used linux kernel, but you cannot install a modified version of the software on those devices since the bootloader is locked. Open Source supporters were happy since it used linux, but Free Software supporters were not happy since we cannot modify it.
A common mistake people make is thinking the difference is in the license, they think Free Software = copyleft/protective and Open Source = non protective/permissive, but that is not correct. What do you think? Since many of us are already committed to other projects, we need new people who have not yet taken lots of responsibilities to step in and organize this.
sahilisterTue 28 Oct 2025 5:00AM
Wiki page has been created https://wiki.fsci.in/Conference
Life is TetrisSat 24 Jan 2026 3:50AM
About alignment questions w.r.t OSS/free/libre or pro-RMS/anti-RMS, are you OK with people from whatever camp if they accept your "package of values"? If so, you could just clarify those values.
From my armchair, I'd say such activity should focus on the "commons". It is for everybody, even the "other" side, but explicitly anti-competitive and anti-exploitative. OIN?
All this is overdue. Since after GNU gave us gcc, glibc, gnat, etc. (Emacs!), volunteers have mostly copied proprietary software foundations but built no user-friendly applications. Corporations then freeloaded on those volunteer foundations, while volunteers botched applications.
Pirate Praveen ·Wed 15 Oct 2025 10:54AM
@Ujjwal Kumar Singh @Kiran S Kunjumon @sahilister @Tanzeem Mohammad Basheer @Akshay @kishy @Abhijith B @Nihal @Manoj Karingamadathil @Nemo thanks for volunteering. Please coordinate among yourselves and take the next steps for inviting bids from local teams/communities.