Fossers valley, Concepts and goals

Welcome to fossers Valley!

Fossers Valley is a open platform created by a group of computer users and Free software advocates willing to share knowledge an awareness about Free software and help computer users become femilier with Free software operating system like GNU/Linux and related software. The main goal of the group is to bring computer experts and beginners together and help people make practical use of technologies which give complete freedom to its users.
this awareness is created through digital Knowledge camps and workshops/ seminars for teaching the use of free software and its practical importance in daily computing tasks.

So what is free software?
Free software is a concept based on the fact that software must be free as in freedom (and not free of cost per say ).
Free software is often called Open source and by some people as Free and Open Source or "FOSS ".
Free software is:
* free to use,
* free to study,
* free to modify and
* free to redistribute provided that the 4 freedoms are passed on to the user who gets the software.
Many non-profit organisations contribute to the development and documentation of free software.
There are many commertial brands of GNU/Linux Operating system which is Free and Open source, Such brands are also called Distros. While Redhat linux or Ubuntu Linux are commertial distributions, Fedora and debian are Complete community supported distros, Although the commertial distros are also mostly based on free software and have an equally big community support.

Apart from GNU/linux which has now developed into a better "virus free " alternative to proprietory systems, there are a large number of widely used free and open source softwares like firefox web browser, VLC media player and many others which
have proved the success of Free software with their high quality and stability.
The reason for the popularity and extensive use of free software is the 4 freedoms on which it is based.
since any one can contribute to its development, documentation and use These free softwares get properly tested and the bugs or errors are fixt very fast.
Many people contribute in terms of new features or inovative ideas and thus free softwares are always a few steps ahead of their proprietory alternatives in most cases.

The main problem however is that many of us are not aware of the existance of free software although we use them every day.
For example google, the most important web portal which includes the search engine and gmail runs on GNU/Linux.
Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is run on GNU/linux.
almost 80% of world's internet runs on free software.
PHP, the most popular web programming language is a free software and so is MySQL Database.
NASA, Ramoji Film City in India runs GNU/Linux.
Many on board entertainment and communication systms on aircrafts used in Kingfisher run GNU/Linux.
But inspite of these success storis, Most of us are not even aware of what software we use.
This is because many common computer users are kept in total darkness by big software companies who don't let the people know the trueth.

Many computer users believe that windows is the only system that can run computers, while many have herd that GNU/Linux is non-professional and unuserfriendly.
But these and many other miths are spread by many commertial companies for their own selfish motives.

This is the reason we aim to make people aware of the softwares we are already using but don't know why they are better than others.
Other major goal is to conduct practical workshops and help people become experts in free software and become free of all computer problems including viruses.
We also aim to create a base for assisting people collaborate on creating documentation for further making use of free software easy and interesting.


So all are welcome to be a part of this open community.
For more information on our events and other documentation on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
visit us at www.fossers.wikispot.org