Monthly Archives: December 2008

FOSS seminar by IOTA Kolkata on Dec 26-28

IOTA Kolkata

IOTA Kolkata

The Institute for Open Technology and Applications (IOTA) will be holding its “Freedom in Computer Technology” seminar later this month at Science City in Kolkata on December 26-28. This seminar aims to promote FOSS in West Bengal and is targeted at state policy makers, industry professionals and academics from Kolkata and neighboring areas. Panel discussions and sessions on open source technologies, business models, licensing, standards and open hardware are on the program. FSF has announced a 3 hour talk ;-) on ‘Copyright vs. Community’ by RMS at the event on Dec 26. If you’re able to attend, please send me feedback about the event.

IOTA’s charter includes promotion of FOSS in government and academia and was founded in 2007. Supported by Sun Microsystems India and Red Hat India, IOTA seeks to provide information on FOSS and open standards to organizations looking to understand how open source can fit into their IT infrastructure. IOTA’s resource center at Jadavpur University also offers training on Linux and Open Office. It would be great to see more quality training on other components of the LAMP stack from IOTA as well as more community participation from ILUG-Cal and other local groups.

GNUnify 2009 announced, CFP now open

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify 2009

Pune’s popular FOSS conference GNUnify has just announced its dates for 2009 – February 13-14. The conference has been organized annually by the Pune FOSS community, Linux User Group (PLUG) and Symbiosis’ Institute for Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) since 2003 and is a favorite meeting place for India’s FOSS community.

The seventh GNUnify plans to bring together another round of excellent technology talks, workshops, BOFs and install-fests. The call for participation is now open – so send in your proposal for an in-depth talk, a serious workshop or a BOF on the latest open source technologies to Harshad Gune or Sudhanwa Jogalekar at GNUnify.

Twincling’s Open Source Summit Programming Contest: Show-off Your Code

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

The Open Source Summit coming up in Hyderabad this weekend has lined up some exceptional talks, workshops and a fun programming contest. Sessions I’d like to be at (and I know you’d be too) include Using Git in your project, Hadoop: a data intensive distributed application framework, Map-Reduce: a distributed model of computation, open source routers, layered security using open source tools and hands-on workshops on Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and OpenMP multi-core programming.

The programming contest challenge “Find the Words” is already underway. All entries must include an English-language explanation of your solution’s design. Contest entries must include source code for the implementation. Also don’t forget to add contributor names, e-mail addresses, and brief resumes (including postal addresses and telephone numbers) of everyone who contributed to the project. The project must be submitted as a gzipped tar file via email to leela at twincling dot org. The submission deadline is midnight (IST) December 12 2008.

Take on this challenge, show off your code and impress your peers.