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”
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-
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
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
For U & Me
Open Journey
22 | JANUARY 2018 | OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU | www.OpenSourceForU.com