Bangalore/DSCE

Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore

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Software Freedom Day 06

16th September 2006, Software Freedom Day is being conducted by the Free software community, Bangalore through organising a seminar and demo on applications / devices that can be run with GNU/Linux system and to create an awareness on Free software.

We start at 11am.

Sessions are

Introduction to Graphics editing with GIMP -- Laxminarayan Kamath
Demo of Rockbox on ipod -- Kanti Jadia
Discussion/FAQ on FOSS (motivation, benefits, challenges, student contributors) -- Laxminarayan, Kanti Jadia, Ramprasad B
Demos/Presentations/Feedback by students
Future plans for DSCE FOSS Community/Upcoming events

Co-Ordinators

Ramprasad B ramprasad_i82 --at --yahoo --dot --com
Laxminarayan Kamath AKA Lucky laxminarayan --at-- deeproot --dot-- co --dot-- in
Kanti Jadia j_kanti --at-- yahoo --dot-- com

Short Report

People started pouring in sloooowly like a thick paste..
First, Lucky designed a quick wallpaper in front of the few people gathered, who were chatting themselves
Due to the lack of autio output, Lucky couldn't use "Flite" or "Festival" and started typing some poll questions in konsole.

* "How many of you read the licenses of the software you use?". Got results like 4 or 5 out of 90. 
* "How many are aware that the software you mostly use needs a license?" - 10 to 11.

Inital awareness of GNU/Linux was very low.. Lucky could also hear more people asking each other "Which operating Systerm is this yaa!?" and replies like "I think this is Linux or something yaa."
Then we got a confirmation that everybody is in and seated. Kanti also reached and began his much awaited talk.
-- Kanti fills in here --
We got good attention from all the students which was very pleasing.
Then Lucky introduced GIMP as a viable replacement for Adobe Photoshop

* demonstrated how easy it is to color a black and white picture.. 
* showed some of his wallpapers and photo retouches as examples of what is possible 
* was relieved to hear some "oooOOOOOOooo" and "aaaAAAAaaa"s in between.
* showed a Logo "Script Fu" and showed them where the script lies.. Also made them realize that this scripting ablitiy can explode the number of possibilites of what you can do with GIMP

The best part was after the talks when 6 students gathered around us who were really intrested.
We went on to discuss various more advantages,aspects, philosophies... of Free and Open Source Software, some success stories - NASA, Bombay Stock Exchange. and how the freedom aspect played a role in it. We mentioned about building clusters using ClusterKnoppix.
We realized we should have planned several different types of demos - some new window managers like enlightenment, some engineering apps, networking apps, etc.. should have been demonstrated.

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