About Free Software Movement Karnataka (FSMK)
Free Software Movement Karnataka (FSMK) is a nonprofit organization formed in March 2009 to spread the ideals of free software. We try to increase the understanding of the philosophy behind free software and encourage its use in educational institutions, our very own community center and other organisations.
The phrase "free and open source software" can be used to collectively describe a set of operating systems and standalone applications that are free from the clutches of large corporate organisations which produce software only for commercial purposes. Free software is often freelyavailable and is created by a thriving community of programmers, designers and writers. The source code(i.e, the computer program) that underlies an application or an operating system is also open to the perusal of the common individual, which allows every curious tinkerer, student orotherwise, to play around with the source code.Most free software organisations welcome the general public to be part of their community and to contribute in any of the three spheres mentioned above. In the event of you not being a programmer, designer or writer, you can also become a member of the community by actively using free software applications, thereby reporting any issues that you notice, and also by spreading awareness about free software among your friends and family.At FSMK, we believe that it is unfortunate that schools, colleges and other small organisations that can use Linux and related free software for no cost, instead invest in using proprietary and commercial software, thereby spending large amounts annually on licensing and other fees, which can instead be used for the betterment of education or related services, and thereby, the betterment of society.
I want to be involved Website: http://fsmk.org/
Mailing list: http://www.fsmk.org/?q=mailinglistsubscribe
About Spoken Tutorial Project:
The Spoken Tutorial project is an initiative of National Mission on Education through ICT, Government of India, to promote IT literacy through Free and Open Source Software. The project is being developed and coordinated by IIT-Bombay and led by Dr. Kannan M. Moudgalya. The project aims at building a repository of self learning courses through video tutorials of various open source softwares. These courses are then used to organize 2 hour workshops in government organizations, NGOs, SMEs and School and Colleges in India completely free of cost for the participants. These tutorials are not only available in English but also in various regional languages for the learner to be able to learn in the language he/she is comfortable in. Currently, Spoken Tutorials are available for free software tools like Blender, GIMP, Latex, Scilab, LibreOffice Suite, Ubuntu Linux, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL and also programming languages and scripts like C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Java. All the spoken tutorials which are released under Creative Commons License are available for download free of cost at their website http://spoken-tutorial.org.
About Jnana Vikas Institute of Technology, Bidadi:
Jnana Vikas Institute of Technology was established in the year 2001 by JNANA VIKAS VIDYA SANGHA with a mission to not just provide a solid educational foundation to students but to build their careers, to make them eminent personalities in the society and to make the industry doors open to them. It is approved by AICTE, New Delhi and affiliated to VTU, Belgaum. It has a residential campus with nearly 73 faculties, 28 technical and non-technical supporting staff, 27 administrative and supporting staff and 590 students and is a self-contained campus located in a beautiful green land of about 25 acres. The institute has four academic departments in various disciplines of engineering and three departments in general science with nearly 19 laboratories all together, organized in a unique pattern. There is a separate department for management discipline. The campus is located at Bidadi, in southern part of city of Bengaluru. More information about the college is provided at their website, http://www.jvitedu.in/