Obituary drafted by Anivar.
Our Friend, and member of This List Shyam Karanatt ended his life himself yesterday afternoon. Still most of his friends are still shocked and not recovered from the pain of this news. Shyam was a very active Free Software advocate and Activist. I like to recall his major contributions to Free Software Movement in India
He was known to me initially through Google Summer of Code candiate for Swathanthra Malayalam Computing , for building the prototype for Malayalam Speech Recognition system. and he started that with a project named sharika based on CMU-SPINX library. He become an active volunteer of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing and part of various other LUGS like Swathanthra Software Users Group Malappuram, Foss Group in MES, FSUG- Thrissur etc. He become the project admin for Translating GNU.ORG webpages to Malayalam, and made a lot of progress with that work . He involved with Organising Various FOSS programmes in his college and varouos cities in Kerala.
Shyam initiated the Syllabus Review page in FCI Wikia http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Syllabus_Review and compiled most of the data, in association with Venkiy . Which become a major intervention too later. He took a major role on realising the idea of GNU labs and implimenting the first functioning GNU lab in MES kuttippuram http://gnulabs.org/
Shyam was a good speaker in various FOSS conferences like FOSS.IN , Mukth.in etc and associate with Various FOSS Groups like IndLinux,
SMC, FSUG-Thrissur, FSUG-Calicut, SSUG Malappurm etc
His funeral is at Ramapuram, Pala, Kottayam District today
Shyam’s Photo From Niyam’s collection http://www.flickr.com/photos/niyam/2399712870/
~ in the memory of a good friend
Gnowgi 