Tag Archives: foss

The incoming Secureboot/Restrictedboot war

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Sandip Bhattacharya

For those who aren’t aware of this, FSF (Free Software Foundation) has been running a campaign for the last few months about Microsoft’s malicious Secureboot initiative (which FSF calls restricted boot). Given the mostly Microsoft friendly corporate IT environments out … Continue reading →

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Indian Open Standards policy finalized, with a major victory for the FOSS community

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Amazing work by all the people involved! Venkatesh Hariharan reported on the Linux Delhi mailing list today: The open standards policy has been finalized and it incorporates many of the suggestions made by the FOSS community in India. In the … Continue reading →

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The magical moment that made me a FOSS guy forever

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

11 years back, I was just yet another guy out of college with a background of Turbo C/C++ and Pascal as most other batchmates of mine. My software career could have gone anywhere. PC Quest Linux was just a toy … Continue reading →

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Apple is as big a threat to FOSS as Microsoft

Posted on October 24, 2008 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Many FOSS enthusiasts do not realize is that Apple is as, if not more, significant threat than Microsoft in the war for software freedom. Most of the technical arguments that FOSS evangelists have, fall apart when you are talking about … Continue reading →

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Discussing Paul Graham’s essay on software patents

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Thanks to Saurabh’s mail on ILUGD, found out about this nice essay by Paul Graham on software patents. Not being much of a lawyer or an expert on these things, but nevertheless having a conviction that software patents are evil, … Continue reading →

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The Microsoft Tax Refund campaign at ILUGD

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Sandip Bhattacharya

ILUGD is presently furiously discussing a legal procedure to get refund for the Microsoft Tax applied to all desktops and laptops that you buy from the branded market in India. Here is a good definition of Microsoft Tax. Some relevant … Continue reading →

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ReCaptcha – Reusing the energy of fighting evil for social good

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Sandip Bhattacharya

The other day I discovered reCAPTCHA , one of those really innovative nifty little ideas that warm my heart. Everyday all of us netizens use so much of our energy fighting the evils of spam – service providers keep warding … Continue reading →

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Mark Shuttleworth on free and “non-free” Linux distros

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Mark Shuttleworth writes in this blog post on a topic I get really emotional about: We have to work together to keep free software freely available. It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows … Continue reading →

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Ubuntu Edgy out in October end

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Haven’t written in ages. So thought I would write down something that I am really looking forward to right now. My distro of choice Kubuntu/Ubuntu is releasing their latest on October 26. From this blog, the RC will be out … Continue reading →

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The number of fonts in your KDE desktop might be slowing it down

Posted on November 30, 2005 by Sandip Bhattacharya

[http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1654](http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1654) >Now the problem is that KDE doesn’t need one font, but about five (monospace, sans serif fonts in different sizes). And as QFont is per process, every KDE/Qt application does this calculation from scratch. It very much depends on … Continue reading →

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