About FSMK Discuss

Free Software Movement Karnataka is a registered not-for-profit organization. Our primary objective is to create and spread awareness of Free Software technologies in different strata of society. We are driven by volunteers, who by day are software engineers, students, academicians, or government officials, and by night are Free Software evangelists. We work closely with college students and encourage them to use, and help develop, Free Software. To make this student interaction, we set up college-level units called GNU/Linux User Groups (GLUGs). These GLUGs organise various technical sessions and events. But what is Free Software? Free Software is software that respects a user’s freedoms. In brief, it means that all users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software as they see fit. Think Free as in Free Speech, not Free Biryani. The opposite of Free Software is what is called Proprietary Software. Proprietary Software do not come with the same freedoms granted to the user by the developers of Free Software. Instead of the user controlling the software, often the software ends up controlling the user, especially since there is no way for the user to even verify what the software does. Proprietary Software is thus an instrument of unjust power, weilded by its developers.