SPACE celebrated its 10th anniversary, with a talk by Richard Stallman, founder of Gnu project and a public exhibition on free software. Mr. Stallman was delivering a lecture on ‘A Free Digital Society’ as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of SPACE at Trivandrum Mascot hotel on 16 January 2014 .
Addressing the importance of free software in education Richard Stallman said, “Educational institutions should take initiatives to propagate free software and use it exclusively. A proprietary software is an agent of withholding knowledge. It should be used only to teach reverse engineering, an area with growing demand.”He also said “ Governmental agencies must exclusively use free software. The state has a responsibility to maintain control over their computing and it is impractical with proprietary software, especially those by foreign companies.” Questioning the trustworthiness of proprietary software, Stallman emphasised on their malicious functionality. He also released the 10th year suvaneir of SPACE . His lecture was attended by more than 350 people and was organized by Kerala Union of Working Journalists (KUWJ) and Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), with the objective of promoting alternative computing, Free, Libre and Open Source Software(FLOSS).
