My Love Affair With Freedom
Open Source For You|January 2018

Wearing geeky eyewear, this dimple-chinned man looks content with his life. When asked about his sun sign, he mimes the sun with its rays, but does not reveal his zodiac sign. Yes, this is the creative and very witty Niyam Bhushan, who has kickstarted a revolution in UX design in India through the workshops conducted by his venture DesignRev. in. In a tete-a-tete with Syeda Beenish of OSFY, this industry veteran, who has spent 30 odd years in understanding and sharing the value of open source with the masses, speaks passionately about the essence of open source. Excerpts:

My Love Affair With Freedom

Discovering Ghostscript back in 1988/89

Being a graphics designer, I came across Ghostscript circa 1988 or 1989. It was a muft and mukt alternative to Postscript. What intrigued me most about it was the licence—GPL, which got me started.

Those were the days when people were curious to understand the difference between freeware, shareware, crippleware and adware. But it was the GPL that made me realise this was a powerful hack of an idea that could transform the IT industry. I was excited from my first encounter and eventually devoted 14 years exclusively to the FOSS movement and its offshoots, most notably, Creative Commons.

The journey

From 1982 to 1985 I was busy learning how to program in machine code on Zilog chips, and later in COBOL and BASIC on DEC mini computers PDP 11/70. But in a few years, I realised the game would be in digital graphics and design. So, I started with pioneering many techniques and workflows with digital graphics design, typography, and imaging in publishing. Eventually, I started consulting for the best IT companies like Apple, Adobe and Xerox in this field, and also with the advertising, publishing and even textile-printing industry. Concurrently, I focused on what was then called human computer interaction (HCI) and is now more popularly known as user- interface design and UX. This is the ultimate love affair between intuition and engineering. The huge impact of the computer industry on billions of people directly can be attributed to this synergy.

This story is from the January 2018 edition of Open Source For You.

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This story is from the January 2018 edition of Open Source For You.

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