As part of the"Know your luggie" series we interviewed Bharathi Subramanium, our ex- co-ordinator,edition #2 ,interviewed by Balachandar Muruganatham and Thyagarajan Shanmugham
Interviewer: Hello Bharathi, welcome.
Bharathi: Hi.
Question 1) Can you tell us about your educational background, your college,school, your favorite subject?
Bharathi: DEEE and BE (CSE). Discontinued the IITM MS. I did my under grad in Bharathidasan Univ, Trichy. All my schooling is in and around native village Tiruvanduthurai. My favourite subject is Practical Science.
Question 2) Tell us about your IT entry, how did you know about FOSS, who introduced you to ilugc? Who is you idol/favourite person in this FOSS world?
Bharathi: I was trying to get into EEE Dept. But at that time, no seat is available. So I took the CSE. That how I entered in to IT field :)
Bharathi: No introduced me to ILUGC. In 2001, I started working on the 1st Research project at IITM, which is in the field of i18n. I was going through the Internet sites, to find more info about i18n.
Bharathi: During that time, I came through some of Linux Users Groups in US and other country. So I started a search to the LUG in India and found ILUGC. I am soo excited to see a LUG in Chennai and that too in IITM. I immediately joined :)
Interviewer: Great.
Bharathi: When i joined, I knew only Bharathi.
Bharathi: My idol is Dr. Sriram and Dr. Prabhu.
Question 3) Can you share us your experience with ILUGC as the co-ordinator aka, office boy? What do you feel as the achievement of ILUGC?
Bharathi: It is very nice. I feel very happy. Nothing is MY achievement. Every achievement is OUR achievement.
Bharathi: As a part of ILUGC, we conducted many Linux Demo Days, Install Fests, Tech Talks. It is collaborative work. As my achievement, I can say, in last 7years and 7months, I managed to arrange meetings in every month, expect 3 or 4 months.
Interviewer: Ok, nice.
Question 4) Now that apple inc has beaten microsoft, do we still think MS is against FOSS? MS gives dev tools for free recently, whats your opinion and what about Apple, is it FOSS friendly? Your comments about MS Open Source licenses.
Bharathi: I feel, nearly 5yrs back itself, Apple and M$ are started looking at FOSS as competitor and draft their business plans accordingly. I am happy to the word open in M$ licences. And lets hope for the best.
Bharathi: From iPhone point of view, I feel, NO. I am not sure about Mac OS. Because I didn't get a chance to use the latest Mac OS.
Interviewer: Ok.
Question 5) Kindly explain DRM in layman terms. DRM free music is sustainable to consumers, vendors? How do you see GPL versus DRM?
Bharathi: DRM in layman term: you are buying a vegetable from a shop and if shop owner is forcing you to cook this vegetable only in gold vessel, then we can say, the vegetable is under DRM. To understand correctly, just replace vegetable with song, cook with play, and gold vessel with iPad.
Interviewer: Good example Bharathi.
Bharathi: :)
Bharathi: GPL and DRM are coming from different background. We cannot directly compare. But GNU project support DRM-free contents.
Question 6) Your take on open formats versus propreitory formats? Which one will you choose?.
Interviewer: I see difference in supporting open formats versus discouraging proprietary formats, since Internet is a commune of technology, is the OSS world ready to discourage proprietary formats like Flash which is more like a platform while there is virtually no equivalents in the OSS arena.
Bharathi: Open formats are very important to assure your ownership of the content. HTML5 will remove the dependency on Flash.
Question 7) Related to mergers, MySQL -> SUN -> Oracle did it. OSS getting merged into proprietary is the future for OSS survival? FOSS too follows the survival of the fittest?
Bharathi: Survival of fittess is common for all. :)
Bharathi: From Human to FOSS Project
Question 8) In promoting FOSS, you had conducted various faculty development programs for the teaching community. What do you see the plus and minuses in these ventures? Your note to the teaching community with respect to FLOSS.
Bharathi: +ve Few college, started using FLOSS in lab. Few students got a chance to work with FLOSS Projects.
Bharathi: -ve Lot of disappointments. Because many of the staffs, who came to FDP, has no intention to learn anything new.
Question 9) Can you share your experience with FOSS and firmware development which you involved?
Bharathi: As part of my career, I involved in many boot loader and kernel level modifications, it was very nice experience. Particularly, I will get amazed by the simple techniques, that are used to solve complex issues at low level layers.
Interviewer: What part does FLOSS had in your firmware development?
Bharathi: We cannot call it as firmware. We can say low level programming. GNU tool chains, UBoot, kernel driver, protocol stacks etc.
Question 10) Many people think knowing Linux will lead to sys admin job. Is it true? Does our people learn great programming using Linux?
Bharathi: Yes. Our people are not reading wonderful FOSS codes.
Question 11) What should be done in order to flourish FOSS innovation? At present, majority of FOSS are coming from European countries, what about India?
Bharathi: Education system should start encouraging the attitude of asking more questions. At the CSE curriculum, students should be encouraged to do projects in FOSS. And finally, the teacher should give all support to the students.
Interviewer: Thanks Bharathi for your time,We appreciate your presence.
Bharathi: Thank you.
Interviewed by Balachandar Muruganatham and Thyagarajan Shanmugham
