Overwhelming response to the Software Freedom Fortnight Celebrations by Swecha

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2010-10-18 21:50
Date

More than 500 students from various colleges in Hyderabad participated in the Free Software workshops held by Swecha. These workshops were held at VNR VJIET, SVIT and SMEC colleges in Hyderabad. The workshops are a sequel to the call given by the Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) to celebrate the Software Freedom Fortnight from the 15th of September (birth anniversary of the father of Indian Engineering, Mokshagundam Visweswarayya) to 2nd October (Gandhi Jayanthi).

Sessions were aimed at introducing various free software alternatives available for the students in the engineering domain. A number of students showed interest in participating in more such workshops. The students were greatly inspired by these workshops to intensify their glug activities in close to 25 engineering colleges with the help of Swecha. The hosting glugs are vglug, EERF and vinx.

The students were introduced to eSwecha which is a GNU/Linux distribution built by the Engineering students and for the Engineering students. The distribution consists of free software useful for Engineering students of all streams like CSE, IT, ECE, EEE, Civil and Mechanical. eSwecha is developed by Engineering students with the help of academicians and software professionals and also worldwide free software community. Among the other sessions that were held were introduction to Free Software philosophy, computer programming with various case studies with hand-on sessions to help the students understand the technologies better.

More participants showed interest in taking up Free Software projects under the guidance of Swecha and also to support the localization projects. The sessions were held on topics to introduce Free Software to the students, the idea behind Free Software.