There are few things in the world that can’t be stopped by a pandemic; one among the list is the ‘Quest of Knowhow’. A group of techies from the rural village of Villupuram in Tamil Nadu did not stop their work towards software freedom, as the V-GLUG was formed recently. The Villupuram GLUG (V-GLUG) is a group of techies involved in promoting free software usage in computers and smart phones, as a part of the global movement aimed against corporate giants that charge for their software.

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U Karkee, one of the founders of V-GLUG said, “Our weekly meetings will address the technical, political and marketing aspects of software freedom. The participants who mainly come from rural areas seldom have access to these ideologies”. D Haripriya, a software engineer told V GLUG aim is to educate rural youth on technical knowledge to compete in the digital era. She added people are not aware of open-source software usage but people in Europe, China, and Ghana are accessing it. We need to move towards a freer, liberated form of internet access. So, in our mission to take this message across techies and students in the district, we started our weekly meeting. The first meeting on Sunday was attended by about 35 students from villages. Since the codes used to develop these software are open and accessible, the open-source software is transparent to users which prevents illegal changing or hacking of codes.

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K Satish Kumar, another engineer in V-GLUG said the codes of paid software are not transparent and anti-virus coding is not possible resulting our system at the risk of bugs. The awareness will grow when the internet users grow up and currently 20% of the population is accessing the internet.

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