APC Talk

Colombo-based Professor Rohan Samarajiva : "As civil society organisations, we tend to forget the less obvious things. Like submarine cables. But these are things that have massive payoffs. You need to be a bit opportunistic about it (while campaigning on that)."

Can a lack of information be solved simply by setting up telecentres? Should poor-governance sought to be sorted out just by building e-governance? And, if the problem is a lack of market information, can this be met merely by building up e-commerce portals?

"Whatever is the state of localisation in India, the government is definitely responsible for framing the policies. We have dreams of software superpowerdom, yet basic tools are not in place. They have spent crores (tens of millions by Government of India organisations) CDAC and TDIL, and that t...

As far as radio waves go, South Asia could perhaps call itself the dark continent. This part of the planet has an almost-uniformly unenlightened policy when it comes to opening up its airwaves. Voices from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal….

Remember the old joke that the doctor’s operation was a success, but the patient died? Free/Libre and Open Source Software (or FOSS) is a great idea. But sometimes it just doesn’t work out right. This was the cautionary message emerging from an ‘open space’ at the APC Regi...

Should people who illegally copy software onto their computer (probably because it’s so outlandishly priced) be called ‘pirates’? Is it fair to liken people who attack ships at high seas to those who make copies of digital products, though it’s against the law? Or is illeg...