free as ‘Bebas’, not as ‘Percuma’

Freedom… not from Amnesty this time, of course not SUHAKAM.

Richard M. Stallman (RMS) touched on freedom last sunday at #fossmy , covering freedom 0 to 3

0 Freedom to run the program as you wish.
1 Freedom to study the source code, and change it to make the program do what you wish.
2 Freedom to redistribute and/or republish exact copies. (This is the freedom to help your neighbor.)
3 Freedom to distribute and/or publish copies of your modified versions. (This is the freedom to contribute to your community.)

and lots more.

Brian Aker was there too to spice things up.

From red1.org

Information Is Free … U HAVE 2 KNOW
People Are Not … U HAVE 2 PAY
Contributors Are Priceless … U HAVE 2 BE

I don’t have much to say about #foss.my, except it was a great experience. Congratulations to the organizers.

Reflections of the past

I started reading about free softwares when reading a book, somewhere around 2001, – Debian Unleashed. There i learned about GNU/Hurd, GNU/Linux and of course Debian Gnu/Linux. Debian was my first GNU/Linux distribution. I did my final year project on a Debian box, version 2.2, kernel 2.4, with a Ximian Gnome Desktop. There was no Ubuntu and the best and easiest Linux was Mandrake.

I was self taught, crawling the Net and having only 1 book to learn PHP and MYSQL. That was before frameworks was invented.

Why i love Debian?

Lots of reference available freely on the Net, including thru mailing list and irc and of course plenty of softwares to choose from

That time, Windows equivalent of server class operating system was Windows 2000, put me into much trouble coz most of the reference online needed me to subcribe and pay first regardsless whether it was proven helpful or not.

From learning Debian i learned values like resilient and self reliance.

Thank you Debian, and the Free, Libre, Open Source Community.

For the record I am a Mac OS X user too coz  i don’t mind sacrificing my ‘freedom’ to Convenience.

Btw, RMS didn’t cry over spilt teh tarik. (those who attended knows what i mean)