THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The CPI(M)'s showpiece event designed to strike a chord with industry captains and potential investors ran into rough weather on its final day on Sunday when freeware champions lambasted the seminar's IT agenda.
The session on information and communication at the International Congress on Kerala Studies proved a bit embarrassing for its organisers when criticism came from within the camp.
Though the party gave enough hints at following the line of West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who inaugurated the Congress in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday, contradictions within the ranks came to fore when matters like information technology and labour laws were discussed.
Some of the participants in the seminar said the draft document promoted multinationals at the cost of freeware.
IT expert Joseph Mathew alleged the resolution was against the principles of freeware policies and aimed at promoting global giants like Microsoft.
“This does not augur well when the communists are thinking in terms of creating support mechanisms to multinationals. This would ultimately bring back slavery and colonialism. The need of the hour is to create opportunities to tap the knowledge sector” Mathew, a consultant to opposition leader VS Achuthanandan, said.
Achuthanandan, who has made public his differences with the dominant party faction led by state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, ruled out a development approach divorced from politics on the opening day of the Congress on Friday.
He has been advocating freeware as an alternative for the hegemony in IT sector. Freeware guru Richard Stallman had acquired celebrity status when he visited Kerala a few years ago.
Disputing the recommendations made in the draft document, Mathew said the proposals would degrade the nation into a community of stenographers and clerks.
Matters headed for a face-off when P V Unnikrishnan, who heads the government's Information Kerala Mission, tried to cut him short. Some of the participants even accused Unnikrishnan of promoting Microsoft in the state.
Freeware and Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation. He is the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.
Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time as a political campaigner, advocating free software and campaigning against software idea patents and expansions of copyright law. The time that he still devotes to programming is spent on GNU Emacs. He supports himself by being paid for around half of the speeches he gives. (Wikipedia)
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