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It has been a long time since I’ve been to Chennai LUG meetings ever since I moved to Bangalore. This time I had promised that I would give a talk on “Programming the Mozilla platform” at the LUG meeting.
The talk went well, with the usual questions I get, like “Difference between any other GUI toolkit like Swing and XUL”, “Why is the documentation, very sparse?”, etc. I had scheduled my talk for 45 mins, but it went over an hour since I edited some slides of my previous talk at FOSS.IN/2005.
After the talk, Shakthi Kannan gave a talk on “USB interface & Linux” which was very good and I got to know quite a bit of the USB interface and the hardware part of it.
The regular Chennai LUG meetings typically end with a “Questions & Answers” section where the attendees ask questions on any topic as long as it is related to GNU/Linux and Open Source.
One of the question was about “Migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux”, and the main problem was found to be lack of applications. The point made here was the user might ask whether an application X he/she is using is available for GNU/Linux.
Even though there are many applications that are alternative to the Windows counterparts, one of the main problem that this didn’t solve is whether the file created using a Windows application X could be opened/imported directly into the GNU/Linux alternative.
How to overcome this problem? We need to encourage/advice our collegues/friends to switch to applications that make use of an open file format because, using a program that makes use of a secret file format locks the users of the software requiring them to forcefully upgrade every time the file format is changed.
There’s an interesting related article written by Richard Stallman on putting end to word attachments.