Slashdot Mirror
Boycott Novell Protesters Manhandled In India
James Mathew writes "This is an interesting story from Kerala, India, where the ruling Communist Party organized a national conference in its efforts to hijack the Free Software Movement, which has enviable roots in the state. They got Novell to sponsor it. On the second day of the conference, a few free software activists who displayed posters against Novell were manhandled by the organizers and police — typical of what is expected from them. Most of the snaps taken during the scuffle were forcefully deleted by the organizers, after seizing the protesters' mobile phones. Still they couldn't delete all. Here is another blow-by-blow account."
There has never been a time in my life when some person of supposed authority have made any attempt to force me to delete photographs from my digital camera. Perhaps I am just not taking photos of important things. But should that happen I might gleefully comply if I didn't want to make a big deal about it.
Many digital cameras use VFAT filesystems which means their contents can be recovered. The utility of my personal choice is photorec(1). The photorec utility runs quite well on Linux. Just use /bin/dd to make an image of the SCSI disk to your HDD, run photorec with the device file as the parameter.
Photorec is written by Christophe GRENIER (no, I am not he) and can be found at:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
There are many Communist parties. This is the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - the CPI(M) or CPM. It is known for doing stuff like this. They're leftist only in name, have neo-liberal policies in their own state, and oppose anything American because it is American.
In addition, they're idiots. They kill people who oppose them (Singur, Nandigram). Their so-called activists, burn, rape and pillage. I, a leftist, would choose the Congress Party of India over the CPM any day.
In addition, they have thin skins, criticising the CPI(M) is A Bad Thing. "Don't you have any respect? How dare you say something about such a respected party" No, fuck you. Lumpen crap.
Footnote: This is the case with most big things in India, the BJP and the Congress are no different, except that they don't hide what they are, and the Congress is a bit too wimpy to shut people up.