[Hamara-devel] Sugam on Debian and the about page.

[shirish शिरीष]

Hi all,

There are and were lots of thoughts after my discussion with Vikas on
Friday evening, but as week-end happened and had to meet with friends
and socialize a bit. As the about page would and should be a
collaborative effort, some numbers, some discussion before making
writing them are in order but even before building sugam using debian
note which Vikas shared and my thoughts why I said it's better to have
or use Debian as the base even now than Ubuntu/Canonical.

a. It doesn't make any sense other than to say that we have done sugam
using Ubuntu (kind of like bragging right) but as far as support or
anything is concerned we wouldn't be able to give/share any of that.
Even how much testing we would be able to do ourselves is not known at
this point of time. If it's on Ubuntu I would probably not be so
inclined to volunteer my time on that, on Debian it would directly or
indirectly serve Debian as well because if any bugs we uncover (if and
when) it would help to make Debian better as well as upstream. On
Canonical/Ubuntu I haven't seen them collaborate on the same level, so
in a sense the commons are served. This serves both ethical and
commercial interests as resources are being used where there is no
danger of being withered away.

b. If you look at the differences between Ubuntu and Debian, that
would be around 20% and Unity is one of the major differences in
there, apart from that there is no much difference (except if you take
Canonical partner offerings but that is a different story altogether.)

c. The other reason which I think I shared or didn't share in my
earlier post is flexibility. In Debian I could use the BSD kernel or
GNU Hurd if the situation so requires (although when and if GNU Hurd
would become a reality is another story in itself) but this is
possible because of de-coupling or not having hard paths to a specific
kernel type. This is and would not be true of Canonical.

For Debian see https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ and
https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/ . You can find quite a good lists
of the various ports and their progress at
https://www.debian.org/ports/ - look at both the official and
unofficial ports to have an understanding of the depth of both the
range of the efforts and people trying to do them.

So, the hard path would probably be tackling d-i (debian-installer)
but this is precisely where people could help. What would be needed is
the latest snapshot of debian-installer, the installation-report
package (already part of d-i) and putting whatever modifications made
to the UI. See https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ and see
the mailing list archives of debian-boot
https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2015/03/threads.html . There is
also #debian-boot on oftc for help and support.

Another tool people could look at would be boxer as have heard good
things about it but as haven't used it can't say one way or the other
(haven't needed to) https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Tools

d. Another interesting sub-project which was taken and is being taken
seriously by folks is using clang to uncover compiler errors alongwith
gcc. See http://clang.debian.net/ .

All of the above shows that people have real reasons for choosing and
using Debian as a base (for me it's all bugs in the open except for
CVE's) and getting timely support.

Apart from all above, if you use Ubuntu now and then want to switch to
Debian that will involve pain both in terms of tools, time and
knowledge which will be completely unnecessary with lower costs now
then in the future.

This concludes my comments about building sugam on Debian.

Now for the about page two re-curring themes were there with Vikas
while we were chatting/discussing on the phone.

a. Localization - This is where we have been bad, how bad we are at it
can be guaged at https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/po/hi (if
we just take hindi at the language to be handled)  I have shared some
brief on that at
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/debutsav-2014-experiences-day-2/
but as shared have no real expertise on it. Having more people having
hands-on and adding to the .po files would help all and any free
software immeasurably while helping development of Sugam itself. This
is a huge problem area but if we are able to do move some tiny
percentages on it, the benefits are immense. As an e.g. you could take
Nokia's making money off cheap mobiles which used local languages as a
starting point, the point is, if the language of all different parts
of the desktop and softwares are in local language, the take-up would
be larger, English as a language is a barrier for many Indians and
hence technology. If technologies such as Raspberry Pi2 or beaglebone
black or any of the newer ARM-based devices could be delivered to
people in local language, there is and would be a quantum leap in
understanding, doing business, entertainment etc. which we can't think
of. Just think of a kid sitting somewhere and using blender in his/her
local language and making an animated movie on his Pi2, just blows the
mind. There are unlimited use-cases for localization and the
'job'/work  is well-defined, just need people who know it, are
passionate about it and willing to devote time on it.

b. EDA - The global EDA industry is somewhere between 9 to 19 billion
dollars depending on whose numbers you believe in. India would
probably be somewhere in 1 or 2 percent as there is some EDA happening
but Modi's 'Make in India' could probably change that. Add to that
technologies which would influence the EDA industry i.e. IOT, Wearable
Computing, Mobile and Social, each of which are estimated to each
generate around 250 billion dollars world-wide by 2020, the
opportunities are unlimited. It's how much risk we are willing to
take. There is quite a bit of EDA tools in FOSS which go hand-in-hand
in the whole open-source hardware philosophy as well. There was an
initiative to package FOSS EDA tools number of years back (a friend of
mine Archis Gore and me and several others) , we did a release but
were unable to do much due to number of reasons (one of the top being
the students our main target group didn't have FOSS in syllabus) so
all the effort went into drain. This is/was about 10 years back. Tools
have grown a lot since then but would need somebody who is passionate
about the EDA industry and can share his/her wisdom with the rest of
us.

c. Sell systems with Hamara Linux - Don't need to say more. Actually
have shared quite of my own quandary at
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/debutsav-2014-experiences-day-2/

Both the ideas as shared by Vikas are rich and have untold dividends.
I am excited to be part of hamaralinux as we get the show on the road
:)
-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
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