In today’s world, we are getting increasingly caught in the trap of mega-corporations even as we strive to move towards digital freedom. But the core our efforts come at the place we get educated at. During my college days, I was taught to write code in .NET, where we were told to drag and drop elements, and write only the functionality for an event. But I was curious to see how a drag and drop worked. I was curious to know why I could not uninstall Internet Explorer while I could uninstall any other software. At certain point, I just realized we were all digital slaves. We are what the software wants to us to be.

Free Software is obviously an alternative, a solution and a way out of many of these issues, but what about the core educational institutions which is where people learn and are exposed to a wide variety of information and experiences ? Shouldn’t they also be free, especially in the kind of technology that is used there (as in freedom) ? Well GNU/Linux provides all those, but we are resistant. Even with the government asking us to move towards the open world, we are resistant. What is stopping these educational institutions from moving towards Free Software ? Is it not knowing what to do? Or is it hesitation in moving out of our traditional ways. Or maybe, we are just scared of the unkowns. Firewall, monitoring, control, software updates and breakages often stop institution system administrators from suggesting it to the management. Managements for the sake of cost cutting choose to install pirated versions of proprietary tools. Is the institutions setting the right example for the budding youth of this country, especially when free alternatives exist.

If you’ve had all these questions too, you’ve found the right place and the right set of people . We are a set of hackers, working on solving some of these issues technically and some philosophically. We still have a lot of unknowns, and a lot of interesting problems to work with.

Come along discuss with us, hack with us, and lets make educational institutions in India free . . . ! After all , educational Institutions should teach their students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent and free society.~

Session difficulty level: Discussion