Hyderabad: Over the past year, the free software movement has been going through a renaissance of sorts. Perhaps due to widespread suspicion of internet websites and applications developed and maintained by corporates, the tech community is moving towards and evangelising “free software”. The community has an active base in Hyderabad, in the form of Swecha, a non-profit organisation that has evangelised the cause since 2005.
The term “free software” refers to software that is free to “run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve”. In essence, the source code of a software product is open to the public and cannot be commercially sold. People can study the code, point out the flaws, improve them, and redistribute it.
Mr Ranjith Raj, executive member at Swecha, explained that the free software system is about cooperation rather than about commercialisation. “The Free Software movement is about empowering the developer and user of a software. In the commercial model, the companies take one software and sell it multiple times. The labour of the person who developed this product is not rewarded. The developer doesn’t even get an attribution in the code. In free and open source software, the developer gets the credit for his work,” he said.
Mr Raj explained that in the commercial model, users and even developers don’t have access to the source code. “Developers don’t know what they are enabling. For instance, Wipro was the technical force behind the National Register of Citizen (NRC) exercise in Assam. The people who worked in Wipro on this project probably had no idea about its use in NRC. If they did — and had access to the source code — they probably wouldn’t have taken part in it,” he said.
Interestingly, Wipro advertised its association with the government of Assam for NRC on its website openly. After the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amend-ment Act and NRC, the company took down the website. But multiple internet users have archived the website and are posting links to it on social media websites. Free software movement proponents also give the example of IBM, which sold its punch-card technology to Nazi Germany to be used in concentration camps.
Proponents argue that it is the labour of a developer that should get rewarded and not the company. “In large companies, employees are a small part of a big project. They don’t know how their work is being used and what impact it may have on the world. If they had access to the source code, they would have a clear picture,” he said.
Mr Shashikant, a BITS Pilani graduate who volunteers for Swecha, had another point to make. He argued that the government spends crore to hire software companies to work on public utilities like the Railways’ IRCTC website or State Bank of India’s internet banking services. “The source codes of these products are never made public. We have seen how alarmingly frequently SBI gets hacked. We don’t know how vulnerable their code is. If the developer community had access to it, they could improve it. Since public money is being spent on these products, the public should have the right to access their code,” he said.
The most popular of late has been Mastodon, a free and open source alternative for Twitter. Mastodon is not owned centrally by anyone and is moderated by volunteer moderators, not dissimilar to Wikipedia. There are similar parallel products to YouTube and Facebook in the form of PeerTube and Pleroma.
The Free Software Movement of India (FSMI), an umbrella organisation that subsumes Swecha, is also working on developing cloud solutions. A lot of the development is, in fact, happening in Hyderabad. FSMI and Swecha do awareness and training programmes for colleges in Hyderabad to evangelise their cause.
Said Mr Raj, “We are seeing a lot of adoption of free software. Many have realised the danger of centralisation of control. There is a trust deficit in companies like Facebook and Google.”
