Hacking for Freedoms in Digital India

FOSS as an ideology evolved to promote freedoms in software development, these ideologies are political thought in how software should be developed and governed. The number of various FOSS licenses under which software is shared is a great example of how these politics are deeply embedded in both code and its terms of usage. The GNU license is considered as the epitome of freedoms in software development allowing anyone to use the produced software with conditions to share the derivative code to the software commons too.

Beyond FOSS, the hacker communities are diverse with multiple political manifestos of their political thought. From crypto anarchists to cypherpunks, hackers liberated cryptography and built privacy preserving tools from encryption to digital signatures. In this talk, we will look into various hacker cultures that exist in Digital India including that of FOSS-United, their roots and what are they fighting for. We will look into code, culture, philosophy and beyond everything, what makes this fight an important political battle beyond software freedoms towards emancipation of mankind.