RMS in SL

RMS came to SL last week. There were two public events. First one in University of Peradeniya and the second one was at SLIIT. Siraj was giving a demo about Plexy at the SLIIT event so I thought of going to that.

So I was there a bit early and met Siraj and Imesh. There were couple of presentations about free software projects scheduled before RMS’s speech. First one was about Sahana. They gave an overview about what the project is and showed where the project is heading. Also showed an OLPC. I first saw an OLPC at OSCON, last year. Next up was Anuradha and Danishka presenting the Sinhala Linux project. Anuradha gave a brief overview of how everything fits together and what components were changed to make Sinhala Unicode fonts appear in apps followed by some screenshots. Danishka then presented the Sinhala localization effort. Next inline was Siraj to present Plexy, the next generation desktop. Too bad there were no time to do a demo. Would’ve been a jaw dropper for sure. Sanjaya then presented about contributing to an Apache project. Finally Bud didn’t had enough time for his presentation since RMS has arrived so he wrapped up quickly.

Unlike other speeches from RMS this speech by far is the best I’ve heard. It was not specific to a certain niche topic but a very general one giving a very thorough and clear overview about many things. You could literally hear the sound of a needle dropping to the floor during the two hour talk. After about 15 minutes of question and answer session I left the hall to help Siraj to setup the computer to demo Plexy. During that time every question the audience threw at RMS got their terms right. He was not telling “you mean free software not open source”