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UPDATE: Talk by Prakash Advani [freeos.com] in Goa
PRAKASH ADVANI, the 28-year-old CEO of freeos.com, was the guest of CSI on
Tuesday evening. During his personal visit to Goa, he took time off to
offer us an interesting two-hour session, at which members listened with
rapt attention.
Soft-spoken Advani made the following points:
* Freeos.com today supports some 30 different operating systems.
* It is an India-based global site, and gets 40% of its traffic from the US.
Germany, Canada and Europe are other big visitors. Indians visiting
site form just 2% of the total!
* It is probably the only site in the globe offering information and
links on such a wide range of free OSs. It offers articles, newsfeeds,
downloads and a wide range related to free OSs. Of all the free OSs,
Linux/GNU is the most popular and promising.
* Says Advani: "We thought the people who would be visiting
our site would be the geeks, nerds and the technies. But it seems
that there are mostly professionals coming in, during the lunch-
break in the US...."
* Advani believes that CALDERA, COREL and MANDRAKE
distributions of Linux are best for the desktop environment.
RedHat would work better with servers, he felt. NIO scientists
(like Albert Gouveia) pointed out that Debian was superb for
scientific applications.
* Advani spoke about QNX (now free), BEOS, GNUHerd, the
BSD family, FreeDows, Minix and FreeDOS, among other
free OSs.
* Linux's biggest advantage is that it supports a wide range of
hardware, he says. "I've used lousy cards, that don't work with
Windows, but do with Linux," he said. Linux also has some
30,000 applications that run on it, which he said is more than
the applications written for Apple, and second only to Micro$oft.
* India has been catching on to Linux. But very few Indian
developers have contributed "back to this OS". Advani quoted
Linus Torvalds (the initiator of the Linux movement) as saying
probably this was just because of the poor Internet connectivity
this country has had. (One needs good access to keep up with
the global debates and development issues in Linux.)
* FreeOS.com is now into downloading Open Source software
and distributing it at the price of Rs 199 per CD. They are on
the lookout for distributors nationwide, and beyond.
* FreeOS.com is also working on enabling KDE to support
Hindi. "In a month's time, we should be able to come out
with something," says he.
* First, the aim is to allow a Hindi-user to be able to write
a letter in his own language. The next target is to get KDE
and GNOME to show menus in Indian languages. "Then we
plan to go to the OS level, and finally to be able to store
records and databases in his own languages," says Advani.
Efforts will be made to make the creation of new language
fonts in other regional languages "so easy that even someone
not knowing a single line of coding will be able to do it".
* "This concept of free OSs is great for a (resource-poor, talent
-rich) country like India. Even for a medium-sized commercial
organisation, buying software is too costly. Spending
Rs 10,000 per user can be a lot of money," he says.
* He was upbeat about speedy progress on the Linux front.
"Four years back, I could not think of one good database that
runs on Linux. Today, I can think of just one database
which doesn't," he says.
* Advani adds that freeOS.com's mission is to "promote and
propagate the use of free OSs... the money will come anyway,"
says he.
* Recently, his firm undertook a 300-user capacity e-mail
system based on Linux for the Mid-Day newspaper group in
Bombay, the largest in the tabloid market. Godrej was also
using Linux-based solutions, as its US-based partner had
also been pushing in this direction, he says.
* Software "licences" were being now applied to ludicrous
extents, he pointed out. For instance, software was being
charged per user, per server, per processor, per computer.
"This is ludicrous; they have to stop at some level," he
pointed out. "It has reached alarming proportions."
* Advani spoke about the Eizel interface, recently showcased
at the LinuxWorld expo in the US. "I haven't seen a better
desktop design yet, in any OS," he said enthusiastically.
Work on it is underway.
* In a lively interaction that followed, ILUG-Goa members
suggested that the time is ripe for special Linux CDs to be
cut specifically to address the needs of particular sections
of computer users. One could have only educational software
for schools. Another could be aimed at musicians, it was
suggested. Some present thought it was good-enough an
idea to be followed up.
* Advani volunteered to take up the distribution tasks of such
a collection, if someone could put together the necessary
software. "It would be best if a musician selected music-
related software, rather than a techie doing it," he felt.
* Questions also came up as to what would be a business-plan
for a software company dealing in open-source software.
"It's a different way of doing business. You're opening up
the market. It works," said Advani. "There are a lot of people
who are making money out of it," he added. Advani also
stressed the need for Indian software professionals to look
at the non-English international market, including at
countries like Germany, France, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
* FreeOS.com is looking forward to its second-round of
funding, after which it plans possibly to have an office
in the US. "Solutions, support and consulting is a huge, huge
market," he said.
* One of his suggestions that attracted the audience was PCs
that could boot and run from a CD. This idea, it was felt, could
be effectively used to refurbish old CDs for educational
purposes... what with CDRom costs falling by the day.
* Contact details for Prakash Advani as below:
Prakash Advani Chief Executive Officer FreeOS.com
US Voice/Fax: +1 (781) 623-8454 ICQ: 26993347
India Tel: (91-22) 4988645/4953441 Fax: 4935133 prakash@xxxxxxxxxx