Ashish Gulhati (born 1973 in

New Delhi New Delhi (, , ''Naī Dillī'') is the capital of India and a part of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

) author, philosopher, notable for being one of India's first online

activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fro ...

s and open source hackers.

Open source

As one of

's original

hackers A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

, Ashish has worked to raise awareness about

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies *Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company * Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway *Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), United ...

in India. In 1993 he co-founded The X Group, the first company to offer professional commercial support for

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

in India, wit
Raj Mathur
He is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

developer and the author of several extensions to the

Perl programming language Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

, including PerlVision, Crypt::GPG, Crypt::Schnorr::AuthSign, Persistence::Database::SQL and Persistence::Object::Postgres.

Articles

His articles and columns in

PCQuest ''PCQuest'' is an Indian technology publication, and part of the Cyber Media group of publications that also publish Dataquest. PCQ Linux Since 2001, an initiative has been called PCQLinux, which is not entirely correct, as the name only re ...

and Dataquest magazines in 1993 and 1994 were among the first in the mainstream Indian computing press to inform thousands of readers about alternative operating systems,

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

, the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

, years before Internet access was commercially available in India. These early article

formed an important part of the PCQuest#PCQ Linux Initiative, PCQuest Linux Initiative that resulted in close to a million Linux CD-ROMs being distributed.

BBS

In pre-Internet

, Ashish created and operated the Primal Scream

Bulletin Board System A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

, and created the country's first inter-city Fidonet echo. Soon after the launch of Internet services in India, Ashish co-founded Sense/NET, a very popular ISP, with

Vipul Ved Prakash Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark, social-media search company Topsy, and open-source AI company TogetherAI. In 2013, Topsy was acquired by Apple Inc. The a ...

. Prakash as of 2018 serves as a Director of Engineering at

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

.Wiring into the World
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Web development

In 1997 Ashish created the award-winning website fo

the first Indian magazine with an online edition. In 1998, he created the website and online publishing engine fo
The American Reporter
the world's first and oldest original daily Internet newspaper, and winner of the landmark

First Amendment First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

case
Shea v Reno

Security and privacy

In 1999, he was involved with Laissez Faire City, where he developed Laissez Faire City's

OpenPGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitio ...

compatible messaging engine, and also deployed secure wireless links for Laissez-Faire City's consulate in Costa Rica. Since 2000, he has been actively involved in various security and privacy-related efforts

References

India Today

The Economic Times

Express Computer India

PCQuest Aug '93 Unix Article

PCQuest Sep '93 Linux Article

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20070409091054/http://netropolis.org/hash/ - Blog * https://web.archive.org/web/20110721181526/http://thefree.in/ - Forum for Rights to Electronic Expression {{DEFAULTSORT:Gulhati, Ashish 1973 births Living people People from New Delhi Indian technology writers