Category Archives: FOSS

GSoC 2009 – India Participates in Global Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2009

Google Summer of Code 2009

In five years, Google’s Summer of Code program has grown open source awareness as well as built contributors on a global scale. The GSoC 2009 program has announced its list of students for this year’s projects. 1000 students from 70 countries have been selected to work with mentors on over 150 open source projects. The top 5 countries include the US with 212 students, India with 101 students, Germany with 55 students, Canada with 44 students and Brazil with 43 students. India sent in 610 applications from which 101 were selected.

One of my favorite projects Fedora has accepted two Indian students – Satya Komaragiri to work on a WYSIWYG DocBook editor for Fedora documentation and Atul Agarwal to work on an Instant Mirror for Fedora. The GNOME project has accepted one Indian student – Ishan Chattopadhyaya working on Anjuta-Python integration. Other projects with Indian students include Drupal, Eclipse, XWiki, Sahana and SugarLabs. Find out more details on the gsoc-india group.

A focused, incentive based program like GSoC attracts smart students from developing countries. It is a great way to engage budding contributors in open source software projects. But let’s not forget that programs like GSoC must be combined with sustained local efforts in order to create lasting contributors. We need to encourage and organize local activities including open source labs, curricula changes, mentoring programs, development of training material and teacher training. Then India’s participation in open source can only grow.

Gaining Political Capital for Open Source in India

Open Source in India

Open Source in India

Open source software has made it to the information technology plans of the political machinery in India. With national elections just around the corner in April and May, everyone in India’s multi-party system is looking for alliances, marriages, deals — any arrangement — to ensure their next win. And everyone is customizing their PR machinery to appeal to the millions of voters in both rural and urban areas – trying to fit the shoe to the appropriate foot.

On March 14th, one of India’s major opposition groups – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced an Information Technology Vision that mentions open source software in two contexts – one of open standards and the other of open source in education. The plan urges the “Government of India to standardize on ‘open standard’ and ‘open source’ software.” It also suggests that “an IT standards-setting body would be spun out of BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards).” The plan further promotes using open source software to expand eEducation, to enable building a Rs.10,000 laptop and to spread innovation in the nation’s academic community.

Noble ideas that would represent giant steps for open source software adoption in India!

In close succession to the BJP’s announcement, another power bloc led by the Communist Party of India – CPI (Marxist) announced their manifesto on March 16th. This proposal for reform in science and technology includes some loaded statements listed below which seem to reinforce a collective model for using open source software and banning software patents.

“…promoting free software and other such new technologies, which are free from monopoly ownership through copyrights or patents;
… the promotion of a “knowledge commons” across disciplines, like biotechnology and drug discovery…..
… scrapping the public funded R&D Bill, that seeks to allow patenting of products that are developed through public funded laboratories…
… revamping the functioning of the Patent offices to ensure strict adherence to the Indian Patent Act;
… stop training and orientation of Indian Patent office personnel by the US and European Patent offices.”

The ruling coalition led by the Congress Party, in its manifesto released on March 24th, talks about using IT to expand educational institutions, to improve connectivity infrastructure and to provide citizen IDs. It does not yet address the opportunities offered to India by open source software but perhaps a little more encouragement could do the trick.

Credit must be given to India’s leaders in the open source software community. They have fought for, motivated and architected inclusion of open source software into the vision statements of some of the major political parties of India. The best of our tireless warriors fighting to gather political capital for open source have included Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat, Jaijit Bhattacharya of Sun Microsystems and Ashish Gautam of IBM.

Ruby on Rails in Hyderabad

Twincling Technology Foundation

Twincling RoR session on March 14th

Twincling Technology Foundation is organizing a half-day “Ruby on Rails” technology session on March 14th, 2009 in Hyderabad. This session will be conducted by Technetra’s Robert Adkins, an expert developer in Ruby and Ruby on Rails and an active open source contributor.

This tech session will be an introduction and tutorial on Rails.

The session will start with an overview of the Rails system and will look at the diverse community that is making Rails so successful today. It will examine conventional Rails program structure and configuration and will cover database migrations and the three most important components: Active Record, Action Controller, and Action View. It will also discuss integration with CSS and Ajax as well as review topics such as testing, security and performance.

Check for further details about the session and registration at Twincling.

GNUnify 2009: Community Support Matters

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify 2009

I’ve been supporting GNUnify in Pune for many years now. And every year it has been great to see the deep support of local organizations like the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), Pune Tech and others.

GNUnify has come a long way. It started off as a small college festival in 2003 and has blossomed into a full-fledged technology conference today that represents the diverse and talented free and open source community of Pune. In an earlier era, while I was organizing LinuxAsia in Delhi, I was happy that I could help Harshad Gune, the key mover behind Gunefy, er… GNUnify, to grow the conference by having key players in the global open source community participate, speak and mentor at GNUnify. I’m proud to have been able to get many of my open source colleagues and friends including David Axmark of MySQL, Brian Behlendorf of Apache, Louis Suarez Potts of OpenOffice, Danese Cooper of OSI, Zaheda Bhorat from Google, Bob Adkins of Technetra, Matt Barker from Ubuntu, Chander Kant of Zmanda, Tony Wasserman of CMU and others to participate locally and help GNUnify grow. In addition, India’s FOSS community poured in their support in the form of speakers, participants, and mentors. That’s why I consider GNUnify to be a serious community contribution to growing open source and collaboration.

This year was another step in the right direction. I was excited when I met with Seth Bindernagel at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View and he agreed that it would be great to pull together a Mozilla Camp at the conference. Seth and his colleague Arun Ranganathan came all the way from California to deliver a fantastic Mozilla Day at the conference. It was also an opportunity for members of Mozilla’s India localization volunteer team to meet, discuss and make things happen for Firefox.

Another project that I was happy to see participate this year was Fedora India. The Fedora Activity Days (FAD) at GNUnify were a high energy effort that pulled together India’s Fedora team. I thank my friends at Red Hat, especially Sankarshan, for making this happen. FAD mentored and inspired developers and students interested in learning and participating more in the Fedora project.

It was also good to see the diversity in the technology program at the conference this year. Other workshops and talks that I thought were well done included Bob’s workshop on “Ruby from Basics” which had more than 70 hands-on participants (wow!), Rajesh’s “Programming with OpenOffice.org” workshop, Bain’s talk on git, Namita’s talk on ext4 filesystems, Dexter’s talk on WordPress tips and tricks “Blog A Way”, Pradeepto’s “Hello World – the KDE way”, and Navin’s talk on FREEconomics: the economics of free open/source. My talk on “User As Contributor: Best Practices For Growing Open Source User Communities” had lots of interaction on how and where FOSS users can contribute to growing the adoption of open source in their local communities, using local languages and locally relevant applications.

A new session at GNUnify this time was the Frequently Used Entries for Localization (FUEL) session which brought together a small but dedicated group (Rajesh Ranjan, Sandeep Shedmake, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, G. Karunakar) working on accurate translations for Marathi localization.

Another new program at GNUnify this year was “FOSS in Academics“. The session perhaps could have been better organized and better attended, but then this reflected the reality that technology education in India is by and large FOSS ignorant and unaware of many of the changes sweeping through the software world. As the need to provide FOSS-ready talent to the Indian IT industry grows, the urgency to incorporate FOSS in education is expected to follow. Its good to see GNUnify try its hand at FOSS in Academics. It might start a trend!

GNUnify 2009: Community Feedback

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify 2009

GNUnify always creates buzz in India’s FOSS beehive ;) and this year was no different.

Here are some blog posts from participants at this year’s conference which I feel provide valuable feedback to tune the conference further to serve its community.

GNUnify 2009 photos can be viewed here.

Open Source in India Today

Open Source in India

Open Source in India

There is a lot happening around the world in open source. And open source is becoming more mainstream in the Indian economy. A variety of interests on the part of government, industry and academia are encouraging adoption of open source software in India. Demand for open source has followed the increase in demand for information technologies in all sectors. Liberalization in procurement policy has also contributed to the demand for open source solutions. Industry, academia and community groups are providing training for open source software skills. All of these trends indicate that India is poised to begin to leverage open source software in a bigger way.

Read more in my recent article on FOSSBazaar.org about what’s happening in India.

Excellent sessions at FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2009, held this weekend at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) campus in Brussels pulled together some excellent talks and sessions. The keynotes by Mark Surman of Mozilla and BDale Garbee of Debian on the first day had a packed auditorium of more than 3000 people. I really liked the lightning talks – the quality of the topics as well as the presenters was top-notch and everyone held to their 15 minute time limits. The hallways were teeming with attendees and the project tables from Mozilla, OpenOffice, BSD, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, KDE, Gnome, OpenSUSE and others were very popular.

FOSDEM 2009

FOSDEM 2009

For being a community organized conference, FOSDEM did a fantastic job in pulling together world class developers and technology leaders from across many open source projects. The audience in general was well informed and interested in the sessions they were attending. I was pleased by the questions as well as suggestions we received during OSI’s public meetings. I also liked FOSDEM’s idea of providing rooms for major projects where each project could dive into topics of interest to their communities. Only a couple of things that could’ve been improved – larger rooms for some of the talks (there was no space to even get in!) and availability of drinking water in the hallways for attendees.

Building open source communities at OSSPAC

OSSPAC Singapore

OSSPAC Singapore

Singapore will be hosting its new open source conference OSSPAC from February 16-18 next month. OSSPAC is being supported by global open source players such as Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, MySQL (Sun) and Novell as well as influential local organizations such as Singapore International Chamber of Commerce and the Singapore Computer Society.

It is great to see an organized effort to hold a open source business conference in Singapore. The timing is right to emphasize how open source can support cost efficiencies and bring a greater value proposition for decision makers especially during the current global economic downturn. The conference is expecting about 500 attendees from quite a spread of nations all the way from India to Indonesia and Malaysia.

OSSPAC has some great keynotes lined up. A couple of keynotes I’m interested in attending include Harish Pillay’s talk on “The Magic of Infinity: How abundance drives innovation and economies” and Dr. Leng’s talk on “iN2015 and the Innovation Bazaar“. The conference program covers a lot of ground with session topics ranging from the virtues of virtualization and Android 101 to building and governing open source communities.

I’ll be speaking on a couple of topics I’m passionate about – on building successful open source communities and on “Open Source Open World” where I’ll talk about the impact of open source outside the US especially in India where open source has developed a large and healthy grassroots community around it but still sees slow industry adoption.

I’m looking forward to being in Singapore and interacting again with the vibrant local open source community.

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.