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How do people make a living out of free software

(This article is taken from a draft created for FSF India article on the same topic)

When people understand that “free software” means the software which respects user’s freedom and not free of cost, the question “how does one earn a living with free software?” comes from the fact that free software ensures the user’s freedom to share exact and modified copies of the software with anyone.

Donate today to keep our services running

We believe every computer user must have freedom and privacy. A lot of services on the internet are privacy-invading and snoop on their users. Therefore, as ethical replacements, to bring the change we seek, we run services so that people can use them without the fear of being tracked or having to spend their time and effort in maintaining them.

My Experience of running Snikket

What is Snikket?

Snikket is a software that can be installed on a server to self-host an xmpp server. Snikket makes some choices for the person installing it on the server and therefore, makes it easy to get the features any XMPP server would usually like to have– audio/video calls, file sharing, etc. It is very convenient to set up and saves time. The downside is that you lose control over your setup, but you can choose to install plain XMPP on the server anyway if you want more control.

Use F-Droid App Store For Freedom and Privacy in Android phones

We have been emphasizing the importance of Free Software (software which gives users freedom to use, study, modify and share) for years now and the problems with nonfree/proprietary software. For users of Android operating system, there is a very easy way to download and use Free Software– via the F-Droid app store. This will help you in replacing proprietary/nonfree apps with Free Software ones, an action which is important to take control of your own device.

Self Hosting, Federation and end-to-end encryption - Freedom and privacy in the 'cloud'

Now-a-days, a lot of apps that we run are not even installed in our own computers. When you visit Google Docs through a browser, the software Google Docs is not installed in your computer, rather it is running on someone else’s computers (in this case, Google). The computer you are running the software from is called a server. Since you are using a remote computer for your computing, you lose control over your own computing. Google Docs is only an example. A lot of software we use in our daily lives run on servers. Some examples are: Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook, Conversations etc. Some of them have an app as well as servers, like Zoom has an app which uses its servers to communicate. Note that servers are an integral part of the working of these apps.

Open Letter to teachers of Kerala

(Updated on 24-Jan-2022 to include an image and a paragraph on how Google’s ads work.)

TL;DR: Google’s free-of-cost offer of G-Suite to Kerala schools is a scheme to make more customers for G-Suite, retain their monopoly power in the ad business and search engines. Dependence on Google can lead to massive surveillance (and its chilling effects), losing our political agency to Google, and many others. We urge educational institutes to reject this offer and switch to free software (freedom-respecting software or swatantra software) for all the activities. For network-based services, we urge institutes to self-host free software powered services. With self-hosting and using free software, the software and the data will be under the institute’s control.

Announcing Software Freedom Camp 2021 (Diversity Edition)

Software Freedom Camp (Diversity Edition) 2021 is an online mentorship programme focusing on diversity organized by Free Software Community of India and inspired by Free Software Camp 2020 and Outreachy. You can learn more about the camp by visiting the camp website. 

Email encryption guide

This is a guide to encrypt emails using pep app. Pep is available for download for Android, iOS, and for desktop, it is available as an add-on in Thunderbird.

How to join Matrix rooms via XMPP and vice-versa?

Matrix-XMPP bridge allows us to link Matrix rooms and XMPP rooms (called public channels) which means XMPP users can post messages in Matrix rooms (using XMPP itself) and Matrix users can post messages in XMPP rooms (using Matrix itself). Note - Matrix-XMPP bridging support is available for unencrypted rooms only as of now.

We do not support ICFOSS anymore !

International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) is an organization started to promote FOSS initiatives in Kerala linking up with FOSS and OSHW (Open Source Hardware) communities from different parts of the world. We, as FSCI and as individual members supported past ICFOSS initiatives.