Re: Kerala evolving new vistas in e-governance

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 02:04:51PM -0700, Sudhakar Chandrasekharan wrote:
> The communism in Kerala is different from the one in China.  China (I
> must confess that I've been to China once - that too a remote part of it
> for half a day) is a dictatorship.  Kerala (where I've been umpteen
> times) is a thriving democracy.

If you followed the URL that I posted in previous mail, this is exactly
what I said and argued that the closest political analogy to GNU/GPL
is communism within a democracy.

I don't call it evil, but it could be unproductive. Note the lack of
any industries in Kerala and the migration of the population to the
gulf, bangalore, bombay and other places where the industry is thriving.

> > I don't believe that communism is completely evil. But a lot of people
> > I've chatted with on the net, do. 
> 
> Then again, quite a few people on the net consider the free market
> economy to be equally evil.

I don't come across these people - probably because the Americans have
a majority on these mailing lists and they have their prejudices about
the C-word.

> Communism, as practiced by China, N.Korea, Cuba etc. might be against
> freedom.  But there are quite a few democratic socialistic / communist
> parts of the world where freedom is compatible with freedom and the
> government - Finland, Sweden, W.Bengal and Kerala, just to name a few.

Exactly my point. Thanks for the note about Finland. I didn't know
about the Socialist leanings of both Finland and Sweden. (Those who
didn't know, Linus has a Swedish descent, but lived in Finland).

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fi.html

> Whatever the form of government, Linux and other free (as in zero cost
> /and/ freedom) software are tools in making computers more affordable
> and better for individuals, governments /and/ corporations.

No doubt about it. Open source and low cost, stable software is the
high bit. All the other differences are less significant in the big
picture, but are significant when you consider the linux eco-system alone.

	-Arun