Free software and Politics
By Yasmin Ahmed

In India, politics rules. In Kerala it is a way of life of the people; the cent per cent literate politically conscious people take politics as a part of their daily bite. Not surprisingly, the Government of Kerala takes huge steps to promote free software and wage battles against proprietary software as well, probably as a part of a left wing stand against American MNCs.

There has been considerable amounts spend at governmental level on promoting Malayalam computing as well and whole departments and organizations like IT Mission built up to facilitate awareness of the advantages of computers in daily life. Techgoss had reported that people like Jimmy Wales, Stallman and Eben Moglen had attended the second international conference on Freedom in Computing Development and Culture hosted by the Government of Kerala at Thiruvananthapuram. So IT is big in Kerala, but so is politics in free software.

It all began with the expressbuzz report on the 19th of December 2008, accusing the Government of Kerala promoting free software with one hand and being users of proprietary software on the other. The report accuses the main party in the ruling coalition, the Communist Party of India Marxist as using the IT Mission to promote an outfit launched by some members of the party, albeit being currently under disfavor. The factionalism in the Kerala wing of the Marxists is on the verge of an explosion currently.

Other accusations include allotting projects worth millions to an NGO called SPACE without going through the normal tender procedures that rule any work amounting to more than 400 US$. More serious are the accusations surrounding the software the IT officials use on their own computers. The person appointed as the Special officer with the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software, a project of the IT Mission) uses an Apple laptop, which has the expensive Mac software. As a blatant proof on misuse of public money, the report points to this: The Insight project office for which the state government pays the rent, is as well used by the SPACE, a private enterprise.

Techgoss finds the report is possibly a bit of undue enthusiasm about facts which look true at the first glance but has justifications to it. SPACE is located not in the Project Insight premises but just next to it and since Insight is a project awarded to the NGO, their presence in the building in the vicinity is not surprising, nor the presence of their staff in the Insight Project premises unwarranted.

The absence of tender is a serious accusation, but it has its reasons says insiders. The projects submitted specifically by SPACE don’t require an open tender but only approval of proposal. And the amounts also seem to be nowhere near the ones quoted in the report.

Then the officer in the FOSS uses a laptop supplied officially to him by his employer, the IT Mission, and the software used is free software called Ubuntu.

So much for the Express report and its revelations, but Techgoss stumbled upon an interesting blog by a media man while browsing the net in connection with this story. Unfortunately it is in Malayalam, but the crux of the blog  Absolutevoid is this.

The blogger has put up a lengthy post on the politics that storms the free software movement in the country. He says it is the aim of the CPI (M) is to get hold of the reigns of the FSF and they are using non-front line knowledge worker personnel to achieve this.
 
He talks of the November conference on free software at the Cochin University which had a lot of disturbances. It seems that a company called Novell which was not in the list of sponsors in the website of the conference later turned up as a platinum sponsor... some FSF workers put up posters at this... but the implication was lost on the majority of those who attended the conference... or as this blogger says, they must have had a hidden aim of splitting FSF with this... the security and the left-wing students had manhandled the poster-stickers and a daily called New Age Business reported the incident as takeover bid of FSF by CPI(M). The Director of FSF Kiran Chandra is accused to be instrumental in this... (He is believed by some people to be one of the IT advisors of the top Indian leaders of the CPI(M) ) The controversy of considering the Conference as the second National FSF conf was also prominent. The first one at Hyderabad in 2007 again fell into a doubt of who had actually organized it...whether it was FSF or Swecha, another organization...Kiran Chandra is again an office bearer of the Swecha as well...read this link to see some boiling points...
 
The September 21, 2008 Freedom and Software conference organized at Chennai shows this take over bid more prominently says the blogger. This conference which had people like Kiran Chandra, Hindu’s N Ram, West Bengal’s IT Minister, etc was organized by the CPI(M) of Tamil Nadu. Since FSF doesn’t have regional chapters and only a national chapter, the movement to unveil a logo for FSF TamilNadu was objected to and in the end the name of the faction was changed to Free Software Forum, Tamil Nadu (Note the acronym is still FSF)
 
Again, West Bengal has been a left fort since ages, but the local efforts at computerization is still with Microsoft and not free software... so inviting the IT minister of the government which supports software giants was considered ugly here as well...
 
Expressed in a few words, the aim is to introduce politics into the FSF movement... and since that has not really worked, A PARALLEL MOVEMENT IN FSF is planned by the Marxist party of India, says the blogger.  The blogger also says that the FSF will ask Kiran Chandra for an explanation in its next Director board meeting...
 
The blogger concludes that it’s good to see political parties get interested in free software, but it isn’t good to let them treat FSF as an extension of the communist movement.

And what were the pros and cons of possible trade unions in the IT sector? What do we know of the under currents that run? And coming back to the press report, any connections between all these events?