Free Software Movement of India, Tasks & Challenges Ahead.

Initiating Gnu/Project (1983), establishing the Gnu Foundation (1984) and Free Software Foundation (1985) and defining the legal frame work of General Public License (GPL), Mr. Richard Mathew Stallman and his colleagues contributed immensely to the social cause. A college student, son of a worker from Finland, Mr Linus Torvald, who was just 18 years old, proved the effectiveness of this movement by creating the Linux kernel in 1991. Foundation for the success of Free Software was laid. Gnu Foundation lead the movement to heights of success. The concept of social ownership is being spread to other areas of knowledge. Open Hardware, Open Standards, Open Access Journals, Creative Commons etc are at different stages of advancement. Free Software and its legal frame work of GPL established successful models demonstrating advantages of social ownership on means of production.

What has been defeated by the Free Software Movement is the appropriation of socially owned software, unlike the appropriation of socially owned land during the pre-historic period and usurping of the tools off of medieval craftsmen who owned them. This crushing defeat inflicted on the exploitative system, though limited to the software domain, has also contributed to the agravation of the crisis it faces.

FSMI views free software not only as an emotional issue involving ethics of freedom but also as one of the streams of concrete means of struggle for the emancipation of mankind from all forms of exploitation. Historically, knowledge has been free. Monopolisation of knowledge started with the emergence of classes. The struggle for freeing the knowledge also started with it. Democratisation of knowledge takes place side by side with democratic expansion. But, even today, though the society is pledged to democracy, knowledge has not disseminated down to all the strata because democracy is not allowed to be rooted deep. Even with that limitation, the dissemination and spread of conventional knowledge tools down to the people cause unimaginable hurdles to the exploiting classes.

It is then, that the new information, communication and entertainment tools became handy for them. The convergence of Voice, Image and Text into digital data revolutionised the information processing of all kinds. The limitations of conventional means of information processing in its repeated use also could be overcome by the new tools. The capability of new tools in enabling repeated use of data gave rise to information explosion. That raised the acceptability of the new tools sky high. A new division based on ownership of knowledge capital has become possible. The new division of society happened to be between those who own or has access to the new tools and those do not. As in the case of denial of conventional knowledge in the past, proprietisation of new tools became handy to sustain the deprivation and possibility for exploitation. Around the same period, in the final lap of 20th centurry, new commodities were identified in the process of search for new markets. Services were transformed into commodity. New ownership forms were required to establish monopoly over them. That has lead to Intellectual Proprty Right (IPR) regime. Copy right was established on software and proprietation and monopolisation of software started.

Software professionals, the most advanced among the working class whose tools were snatched away before their own eyes, responded sharply to the day light robbery. They created software as a public asset against those in proprietary regime. For them what is important is their intellectual property and not intellectual property right.

Knowledge resource is taken from the society for both free as well as proprietary systems. New knowledge is generated through its use, adding new value to it in both cases. The new value generated and added to the existing ones ensure their livelihood. Proprietary ones are created or upgraded by the limited hired labour in the gaol like sweat rooms of monopoly software houses. Free Software system share the process knowledge with the society. That do not subject the society to infinite loot as done by proprietary software owners, who keep the process knowledge secret. Hence free software regime get back the support from the society. Bugs are settled by the first who identify it if he can. Or it is done by the first who knows, comes across and gets time. Thus free software gets richer and bugfree fast. No virus threat. High level of data security. High order of net work stability. There is no wonder free software has grown in quality and quantity surpassing the proprietary ones. According to a study, free software will take half the market share by 2010 and proprietary software will be out of the market by 2017. Other conditions remaining same, this may be true according to present trends. But, conditions do not remain the same.

Information Technology has application every where information is used, in management of the society, communication, production, distribution, entertainment, social organisations, every where. But this field is dominated by multinational monopoly houses. Indian companies are providing software service by giving patent fee to the multinationals. Premium price is levied on IT services. Wealth is syphoned from other sectors to software sector and from underdeveloped, developing and rest of the developed nations to the US. IT and Software has become a tool of imperialist exploitation and its sustenance. The ill effects of software monopoly is evident in all sectors. All these factors increases the importance of software in the present day competitive world.

These new tools are being used in the production process by the monopoly capital. Comprehensive and dynamic information network increased the mobility of capital. Capital was liberated from all forms of local as well as national bounds. Industry utilise it to reduce cost of production, both labour and wages. It enabled the industrial capitalists to increase their profit rate through making the management, production, marketing, movement of raw materials and produced goods dynamic and less expensive. It helped them to increase their profits through organising production at sources of raw materials or where wages are less or near to the market whichever is more profitable, reducing stock holding and thereby investment by producing only what is being sold achieved through integrating all process including that of production and market access by the communication network, organising distributed production centres as against the large manufacturing centres in the classical industrial era, often outsourcing the work, avoiding permanent labour, engaging contract or homestead labour at reduced wages instead, and through all these reducing the organised strength and avoiding them opportunity to organise, reducing wages, increasing working hours. The new communication network helped them to reduce the wage bill by substituting the skilled labourers with unkilled labour. It also helped to convert vast majority of workers into contract labourers and thus to weaken the organised strength of the labour.

Migration to free software avoids the resource drain from the local community. It contributes to expansion of national market. Business opportunities and income of small and medium enterprises will go up. Profit earned by Indian service providers will increase. SMEs can be empowered with efficient business management system using state of the art information technology infrastructure and make them competitive at par with Multinationals. Such efficient management system is not accessible to them at present. Free Software will help our students to acquire real knowledge on software. Today, while using proprietary softwares, they only view its exterior features and are learning only the operational procedure without access to its source code. Students of other disciplines are unable to have the required software tools to learn their subjects due to prohibitive costs. Migration to Free Software solves these problems too. The migration of even corporate bodies to free software is the proof for its financial and technical superiority.

Free Software Movement is spreading world over. It took roots in India in the second half of 1990's. Study groups and Users groups were formed in different parts of the country. Individual and collective initiatives for practical applications were visible at different parts of the country. FSFI was instituted. By and large they limited their activities to local software development communities and interaction among them being limited to the cyber space. Local language computing was an area which was much benefitted by the spread of the idea of free software. Naturally, this lead to emergence of state wide initiatives. Now with the formation of Free Software Movement of India it surfaces on the national plane.

FSMI doesnot claim the monopoly of Software Movement in the country. FSMI approaches the Indian movement realistically. FSFI has got its role to play in technical as well as legal domains. Users groups have got their slots for spread of free software and local empowerment. Free Software Movement has so far been advancing with a distributed architecture. A power centre is not required for it. Interaction and co-operation among them exists over internet. Many internet groups are in the process of forming larger congregations.

By and large, they are unable to acquire the much required capability of spreading the message of software freedom and the possibilities of Free Software use over to the vast expanse of the country. Even today despite passage of over two decades from the first Linux kernel was succesfully developed, Govt of India and most of the State Governments are yet to identify its advantages and to start use them. Only Kerala with its it@school project, ORUMA of KSEB, Insight of Space, Malayalam Computing, Malayalam projects and CATFOSS of CDiT etc and Tamilnadu with its Elcot could advance with the use of Free Software. it@school project started in 2003 using proprietary software was migrated to Free Software over a threat of agitation by the teachers union, KSTA. ORUMA of KSEB was initiated by an internal team on the initiative of the workers and officers associations there. FSFI, with its headquarters in Trivandrum has definitely helped these advancements.

Threats of monopoly software companies through central government funding and consulting agencies do exist against such local initiatives. Such threats are not against free software projects alone but is equally applicable to projects using proprietary platforms like Information Kerala Mission (IKM), the agency responsible for e-governance projects of Panchayathi Raj Institutions. IT projects of Municipal Corporations, though covered by IKM, is one by one handed over to the IT corporates using proprietary platforms and taking monopoly profit by retaining all knowhow secret, under JNURM, a centrally sponsored scheme. What is required for sustained local empowerment is migration of IKM, Akshaya, SPARK etc to Free Software, establishing them as successful local level alternatives. Use of Free Software alone shall generate and build up the necessary compulsion for allowing local alternatives.

The major advantage offered by Free Software is the opportunity for local and national empowerment. If that is not utilised, on some or the other arguments and excuses, the hold of the monopoly capital will be tightened. Globally, Google, Amazone etc are using Free Softare. But, they are Transnational Corporations. They are treading on a course more dangerous than that of the Novell who brought shame to the free software movement by its Microsoft tie-up. They are building a business model, named cloud computing, by giving total end user services, monopolising hardware, networking, platforms and such other infrastructure etc along with application software. Users neednot worry about any thing other than a browser to run on the terminal. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) etc. are the practical applications. Sharing of various resources will reduce the cost considerably. Sharing and co-operation reduces the expenditure. Reduced price of commodities has always been the best tool for monopolising any market. The low cost of cloud services will definitely enable the corporates to take over any IT service market. In the process, they establish absolute monopoly over the data, which enhance their power and weaken any further resistance. The result is that the freedom successfully returned and ensured by the successful free software movement is being denied to not only to local communities but to nationalities even. This is the single major threat posed by the free software movement, today. The prejudices against commercial use of free software, over emphasis on the ethical value of freedom it offers, consequent conflicts between free software and open source streams etc are inhibiting the spread of Free Software.

The alternative succesfully established by Free Software Movement against software proprietisation indicates the way to meet the challenge from the present monopolisation drive through clouds. But this challenge cannot be met effectively by individuals or even small groups alone, as was possible in the case of software. Intervention of society with consolidation of sizable strength and resources is required. As Free software against proprietary software, public clouds (owned by society) shall have to be set up against private clouds. Local self government institutions, state governments departments, public sector undertakings, universities, engineering colleges, co-operatives and such other socially owned organisations and local business community wedded to local empowerment have to be mobilised to share this responsibility. Such public clouds set up locally can play a decisive role in further democratic advance of the society as a whole, side by side with empowerment of backward communities of all hues and thus step by step, at the same time, faster development of the society. That means, inorder to defend the software freedom established by the free software movement, it has to consolidate its strength and to mobilise maximum resources. That cannot be achieved by a movement of communities of software developers' alone, howsoever distributed or centralised their organisational architecture is. The answer is network of organisations representing people of all walks of life. Sure, free software, the software developers' community as also the Free Software Foundation will have a crucial role in it. There is no limit as to the number of net works. What is important is that they shall be networked. Peer to Peer. Network to Network.

This is the objective with which Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom (DAKF) in Kerala and the Free Software Movement of India (FSMI), nationwide are formed. Both are congregation of communities. Every community joining these networks can work for the objectives with which they are formed, while, at the same time, unitedly working for defending and expanding software freedom and bridging digital devide. Each of the community can retain its identity. The central organisation will not act as a monopoly power. It will only lead the massive activities that are required at any particular period of time by consolidating the strengths of communities for well defined objectives agreed by all. These networks are not against any other networks. The new networks will not make any other active network redundant, either. FSMI as also DAKF shall always be ready for joint action with any other organisation for defending software freedom and bridging digital devide.

Joseph Thomas, President, FSMI, 15-04-2010