MEETING SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS With Open Source Software

Children and adults with special needs require special education. Cboard is a free and open source software for special children, but a lot of work is still needed in this domain, especially in India.

- DR DEEPU BENSON

It is amazing to see how much selfless collective human effort can achieve. Let me give an example. Almost two decades ago, I got a CD-ROM of Encarta, a digital multimedia encyclopaedia released by Microsoft. At a time when dial-up connections were slow, internet speed was measured in kilobytes, and data was as precious as gold, this CD-ROM of Encarta was a treasure trove of information for me, a young man from a small village in Kerala. If somebody had told me that within a decade Encarta would be a commercial failure and go out of business because of an encyclopaedia written by volunteers working for free, I wouldn't have believed them. Encarta had articles written by experts in their respective fields who were paid for their expertise, whereas the one that defeated it had content that could be edited by anyone with internet connectivity.

What is the name of the winner? Of course, it is Wikipedia. But how did this happen? How did Wikipedia become the ultimate source of knowledge in the world? It was the collective power of selfless human effort. Indeed, on many occasions, I have come across Wikipedia articles edited by Nobel laureates and fields medalists.

Another remarkable area where people collaborate selflessly is software development. Consider all the free and open source software available to individuals across various fields and aspects of life. Two things constantly amaze me about free and open source software. First, the exceptional dedication of numerous talented individuals who spend their leisure time on complex programming so that all of humanity can benefit. Second, the incredible range of free and open source software, from simple text editors like Nano and Atom to sophisticated operating system distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian.