Click to play videoNew Delhi: Technology is all about owning the future and the future is all about knowledge. But turning a logical conclusion on it's head, people like Wikipedia founder Jim Wales don't want to own that knowledge.
"I'm not utopian, but there are large bodies of knowledge that should be available freely. It really makes a lot more sense for this nformation to be freely available," founder of Wikipedia, Jim Wales, said.
And he's found a fan in Minister of State at the Prime Minister's Office Prithviraj Chavan. "Wikipedia is a living organism and that is the great thing about it," he said.
Speaking at the inauguration of a symposium on Intellectual Property Rights organised by IIT Delhi and Linux distributer Redhat, Chavan talked about his own experience with open source software.
"Sometime last month, an article in one of the leading newspapers gave some information about Wikimapia that has got on to the net," Chavan said.
"It is a phenomenal software, the only thing is that when I looked at my house, it was wrongly labelled as the Prime Minister's house," he added.
But what really made these people happy was when Chavan said, "There are some tenders that insist on propreitary software. This is bad unless there is a sufficient justification for it. The government wants to be technology neutral."
As the next two days are spent eating interesting meals and discussing the future of the knowledge economy and information society one thing is clear - on the menu is 'food for thought'.
And thought that could help deal with the challenges and the opportunities of the knowledge economy.
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