Father of free software Richard Stallman is visiting Hyderabad to oversee the migration of thousands of computers to a new "Indian" operating system.

E-Swecha is being installed on 21,000 computers across Andhra Pradesh starting today in TRR College. It is based on the Debian OS Linux, was created by the student community in engineering colleges in Hyderabad and has been in development for a year. The OS is packed with all the tools that engineering students could possibly need on a single platform.

Stallman said that free software use in India was fairly high, though much remained to be done. He said that Kerala took the initiative by migrating computers in its public schools to free software, due to the efforts of the Free Software Foundation of India.

While some schools in Karnataka and West Bengal have made the switch, progress was stalled in Andhra Pradesh because the government was not listening, Stallman said. X

Check Out
Expressbuzz