Here’s a piece by Tarsh Thekaekara, a founding member of GUSS, on the experience of changing to swathantra software. This is part of a presentation given at a seminar on ‘ICT and free software for NGOs’
“Free Software is a matter of freedom, not cost. It is a matter of liberty, not price. The word `free’ in Free Software is like free speech, free people and free country and should not be confused with its other meaning associated with zero-cost. Think of Free Software as software which is free of incumbrances, not necessarily free of cost. Think of it as swatantra software.” www.gnu.org.in
Makes absolutely perfect sense for a community that got cheated of its land because they treated it as common resource, that could not be privately owned.
A bit about Us
Action for Community Organisation and Development (ACCORD) and the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS) are voluntary organisations working with the adivasis in the Gudalur area of the Nilgiri hills. The genesis of Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS) goes back to 1986. ACCORD was founded as an activist group in response to the rampant exploitation of the adivasis in the Gudalur Valley. To help them organise themselves in order to assert their human rights. The focus was land rights. Adivasi youth went from village to village, talking to people about their rights, and urging them to unite and stand up for their birthright – land.
Once this was established the need for other services – like health, education and housing – was recognised by the community leaders . A people’s organisation – AMS – was then setup to run these institutions. The AMS, staffed and managed completely by the Adivasis, now runs a hospital along with various other community health programmes. It also manages the Vidyodaya school, other educational outreach activities, and numerous other income generation and community related programmes, including a community owned tea estate and a tea leaf marketing society. There are still non-adivasis involved - doctors, teachers, advisors, and admistrators – but all the key decisions are taken by the adivasi team.
There is also another initiative – Just Change – associated with the AMS. Just Change attempts to establish an alternative trading mechanism that will benefit poor communities by directly linking them up and encouraging them to trade among themselves.
In Gudalur, in spite of the successful leap from labourers to producers, the adivasis found they were catapulted from a local wage economy into a global market economy. This left them still extremely vulnerable, as they had no control over the market forces that would determine the price of their produce. In fact, a few years ago, tea prices crashed, not even matching the cost of production. At another level, the adivasis, as consumers, pump large sums of money into the economy, but at the end of the day have very little to show for it. A recent survey pegged the total money generated annually by the 3000 families of the AMS at a little over 7.5 crore rupees. The money flowed outwards through the local shops, to wholesalers and large multinational companies. It was this analysis that triggered the setting up of Just Change.
Why Free Software?
Free as in Freedom. That was more than enough, a reason in itself to adopt free software. Further, an integral part of the work in Just Change is to keep money within a local economy. All NGO’s, should ask themselves if it seems fair to receive donations and funds for poor/deprived communities, only to give a part of that money back to huge, already rich multinational companies by purchasing exorbitant software from them.
Ideologically, there was no problem. GNU/Linux and free software was definitely a good idea. The big question was how? Are there free alternatives for all the software we use? Which distributon to use? Is installation difficult? No one had the confidence and knowledge to attempt to fully shift away from proprietary software.
The first step was a visit in October 2007 by Satish Babu and Amarnath Raja – founding members of SPACE (Society for the Promotion of Alternate Computing and Employment), Kerala and both very involved in the setting up of the Free Software Foundation in India. For most of us, the conversion happened then. Once this decision to move, irrespective of the hardships, was made, it was not too difficult. What followed was a four day training conducted by SPACE. SPACE gives support to NGO’s and educational institutions interested in switching to free software. This was a comprehensive training, which covered the GNU/Linux Desktop Environment, Introduction to Open Office, File Management and other important concepts relating to GNU/Linux Distribution, Installation and trouble shooting and detailed planning for migration.
This foundation gave us the confidence to move the first few machines to GNU/Linux, and was the start of the switch. Now nearly all our machines run free software. Everyone sits at their machine a little prouder. A little freer.
Office Applications: We were all very dependent on proprietary word processors and spreadsheets, but Open Office Writer and Spreadsheet smoothly replaced this. They have all the functionality we could possibly want. Particular tools (like track changes and page setup) are often in different places, but these are normally in more logical places.
We also use a lot of data base applications that we had written in a proprietary environment, but Open Office Base could not run these as they were. We plan to shift these applications to a free platform over time though.
Images and Posters: GIMP, Scribus and Inkscape easily replace the proprietary image editing tools normally used. Though something like Adobe Photoshop has more features than GIMP, for us (and probably most other NGOs and ordinary home users) most of those extra features are not needed, and GIMP is enough besides being easier to use.
Web Designing: Kompozer is a good, simple replacement, without unneccesary frills.
Email/Internet: Firefox was anyway the preferred web browser even before the move to free software. Even for email clients, Evolution and Thunderbird were easy replacements.
Multimedia: Here again VLC and Mplayer are better than the non-free alternatives. Rhythmbox is good enough for music.
Accounts: Here also we have not found an easy solution. We have been using Tally, and have not found a free alternative.
Pros
Some of the other advantages were:
Hardware: Using a GNU/Linux server gave a new lease of life to many of our old and dying machines. We bought one new high end PC and installed the Linux Terminal Server Project on it. All the old machines (including one 486) that could no longer run the newer versions of windows were connected to it, and ran off the server.
Language: Tamil and Malayalam fonts and support were a huge issue with proprietary software, but work seamlessly with free software. It has been a liberating experience to work in other languages without having to worry about compatibility between machines and fonts.
Viruses and updates: Since there are no recorded viruses for GNU/Linux to date, having a virus free computer experience was a huge boon. Updating from one version while keeping your files intact was also a breeze.
Stability: Since we started using the GNU/Linux server, everyone has spent a lot less time ‘maintaining’ our machines. In fact, the server has been running for over 6 months now, without being touched.
Some minor problems
One of the major issues that NGOs may face is that there is no support easily available. You cannot call your computer hardware person and get them to re-install your OS or fix problems. There is not yet that level of understanding of GNU/Linux in India. In-house support has to be developed. This can easily be done though, and only needs some people within the organisation who are relatively computer literate and are willing to learn. Someone will have to often search the internet and look for solutions to the problems.
There is also a small problem that for most issues you have to depend on the internet for downloads or help. If internet connection is not easily available it may be a little difficult to manage.
Another minor problem we faced was that first generation learners, who had spent a lot of time and energy to learn how to use ‘computers’ were not aware that they only know about one type of operating system. Many of them found it somewhat difficult to re-learn things. For new trainees however, this was not an issue, as working in a GNU/Linux environment is not any more difficult from working in a windows environment.
To Summarise
We would all like to believe we are a free people, with free speech, living in a free country. A country that is trying hard to bring IT into every corner. But somehow we don’t seem to be bothered about the lack of freedom in the IT sector. We are happy to be slaves to an expoitative software system which shamelessly exploits its users.
