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"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it" - Abraham Lincoln. Tired of the annoying restrictions that your proprietary solutions thrust upon you? Want your software to work as you desire, without any licence constraints? Shelling out big money for small tools that you need? If yes, then step into the world of Open Source.
Open Source is a just a philosophy to the software community but a religion to its followers who know its real power. Simply, Open Source is a huge body of public licensed software that is shared free-of-cost, together with the source code. Anyone can improve or customise the existing code and release as a new open source product. This, obviously, means that the development time is reduced with increased quality and better understanding of the technology. There are equivalent open source solutions for any possible proprietary software you can think of and the best part is that they are all available free-of-cost. Why pay when you can get it free?
Find the philosophy interesting and want to know more? Then, be there at Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, Chromepet on March 3, 2007, to witness Chennai's biggest open source festival - Carte Blanche, a French word for 'Unlimited Freedom', carries the flavour of the event – 'OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE'.
Carte Blanche 07 is an upcoming fete on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS), organised by the Computer Society of MIT and technically supported by AU-KBC, The Indian Linux User Group - Chennai Chapter (ILUGC), National Resource Centre for FOSS, Computer Society of India (CSI) and IEEE Computer Society, and sponsored by Chennaionline.com
All these big names come together with just one common mission - creating awareness about FOSS at the grassroots-level and also encouraging society to use open source software instead of copyrighted software. Pioneering in the field of open source software right from its evolution, MIT is now one of the very few institutions with an active Linux working group and that's why Richard Stallman himself has visited the college twice. MIT has been contributing to the open source fraternity consistently and the next indigenous product from MIT is 'Swatantara V1.0', a free live CD of GNU/Linux system, custom-built for engineering students, packed with all the scientific software they would require. This product would be released during the event.
Carte Blanche 07 has lots of events for people from different age groups. While the Linux demos are targeted towards the school kids and Linux lovers, college students can participate in a number of events like paper presentation, Linux quiz, programming contest and many more technically challenging events. The guest lectures, which are to be delivered by the experts from CTS, Red-hat and Novell ensure participation of the IT industry. The event acts as a hub, bringing together the IT industry and the student community to share their knowledge with each other.
The details of the events can be found at 'http://www.cs-mit.org/cb07'. Interested participants can register online. With such a wide variety of events being scheduled, Carte Blanche 07 is sure to disseminate open source knowledge at all levels as well as open the doors to open source for schoolchildren. The event is sure to be informative and educative to all. As they say, 'Free is the way to grow'.
R Rangaraj
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