The seventh C V S Sarma Memorial lecture was delivered by Mr. Sunil Abraham on ‘Freedom Continuum: From access to knowledge to piracy ‘organized by Department of Communication at Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication here on Friday.
Remembering Bertrand Russell Mr. Sunil says “If I have one apple and you have one apple, when we exchange we both still have one apple, where has ideas are different, when we exchange we have two ideas, that’s the magic of intangible property sharing does not comes with cost”.
Sunil Abraham
A Social entrepreneur and free software advocate Mr. Sunil, is the Executive Director of ‘Center for Internet and Society’, a Bangalore based research organisation. He was elected an Ashoka fellow in 1999 to ‘explore the democratic potential of the Internet’ and was also granted a Sarai FLOSS fellowship in 2003. Between June 2004 and June 2007, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of United Nations Development Programme’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
He said that most of the software on the desktop computers is even today proprietary software, because our freedom taken away by not to ‘Use, Share and Modify’.
“Whenever people ask me the most successful free software on the planet, my answer was same ‘Apple’. Because ‘Apple’ is not 100 percent proprietary, it is available under copy cent license” he said. He said that ‘Apple Company’ makes a derivative work and ‘user interface’. This is the only free software which provides us the extra fifth freedom; license to change the derivative work (Freedom to re-appropriate the software) he averred.
He said that the freedom guaranteed by the free software is not same as by the openly consumed license. The licensed software cannot address the power of problems directly. The original free software project is healthy he added.
Explaining the essence of a story he said that the reason why most radicals are fixated with the attribution because they are buying propaganda. Talking on pirated part of intellectual property rights he said “the propaganda is the intangible labour, somehow more valuable than the tangible labour”. Describing it he said that when we enter the halls of university, we notice the scholars name on the walls. Because they engaged in intangible labour, but people who built that hall or classroom, they get no attribution at all. Because manual labour needs no attribution he avers.
Vote of thanks was carried by Professor Anjali Lal Gupta and a warm welcome to the alumni followed the lecture.