Microsoft Inc. has now openly claimed that it had entered into agreement and strategic partnership with 14 Indian State Governments, prestigious public institutions like National Informatics Centre and the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India (see http://download.microsoft.com/). Microsoft has claimed that it has been working around some of these agencies for the past 13 years. Most of these projects, now identified as e-Governance projects in operation in various central and state governments, needless to say, are on proprietary non-free Microsoft platforms. The states with which Microsoft claims to have entered into strategic partnership and the states where its projects are in operation include Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Tripura, West Bengal, Kerala, Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Orissa, Punjab and Maharashtra.

Dr. Richard M Stallman (rms) will be in Hyderabad to speak about the relationship between software and freedom. The talk is being organised by the Free Software Foundation of India - AP Chapter. The talk will be held on the 20th October, 2006 at the Tagore Auditorium, Osmania University, Hyderabad, at 16:00 Hrs IST. More details about the project are available at the FSF of India - AP Chapter website. All Free Software enthusiasts are invited to attend the event.

The Andhra Pradesh chapter of Free Software Foundation of India is celebrating Software Freedom Day on the 28th of September. About 1000 programmers and translators will work from different geographical locations to localise the applications in GNU/Linux to Telugu. This sprint is unique and first of its kind in the world where a huge number of passionate programmers will work on porting the GNU/Linux applications into Telugu. The slogan, from the community to the community, is the spirit of this sprint.

Students from different engineering colleges, people working in the IT industry in India and abroad, school teachers, people from the media and from different sections of the society will participate to make the software available to the people in Andhra Pradesh.

The specific target is to transform the complete GNOME desktop and surrounding applications. This activity is unique of its kind and is being held first time in the world, where 1000 programmers and translators from different geographical locations (all corners of the world) will be transforming 50,000 message strings into Telugu. This will commemorate the availability of a complete computer desktop in Telugu. The necessary technology support has already been developed by FSF of India AP chapter. The complete work is scheduled to be released on the AP Formation Day.

Interested people can mail the organisers directly at localisation at swecha dot org.

More information on this is available on the Swecha.org website.

The recordings of proceedings of the 4^th International Conference on GPLv3 is now available from the http://gplv3.fsf.org/av/ website. The video is in Theora/Speex format and the audio is in Speex format. Any player that uses the gstreamer framework or MPlayer will be able to play the files without any problems. The instructions for other operating systems may vary. For more information on Speex and Theora, please visit the Wikipedia pages on Speex and Theora. The transcripts of the said speeches will also be made available at our website.