Category Archives: FOSS

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.

Twincling’s Open Source Summit ’08: Contributing to Open Source

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Cool technology, hacking code, phenomenal energy — that’s the upcoming Twincling Open Source Summit in Hyderabad.

Over the last few years it’s been fantastic to see the growing energy around open source software in Hyderabad resulting from the dedicated efforts of the Twincling Technology Foundation. This year, Twincling is organizing its 2-day Open Source Summit on December 13-14 at the beautiful IIIT Campus in Gachibowli. The agenda includes in-depth sessions on open source technologies like KDE, Git, Hadoop, OpenSUSE and Gentoo. Plus, the second day will have hands-on workshops by Intel engineers on Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and openMP. There also will be sessions on open source Web 2.0 frameworks, virtualization, networking, operating systems and multi-core software development technologies.

At Twincling events, I’ve come to expect a high level of participation from attendees, high quality discussions, and good technology sessions. Earlier this year, I conducted the Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum organized by Twincling. I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the local developer community. They are eager to build software and start-ups based on open source tools and techniques.

At this year’s Open Source Summit, developers can expect to learn about the latest in open source software, share their knowledge and, as always, network with peers. So mark your calendars for December 13-14 (Saturday-Sunday) and participate at the summit. Don’t miss this opportunity to join in the excitement.

Celebrate Software Freedom Day on 20 September

Transparency is key in enabling people to participate in the creation of wealth and well-being in society. In the past decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has become one of the major catalysts in increasing transparency by lowering the barrier to access the best software technologies. Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebrates this important role of FOSS in making this change happen globally.

Educate, distribute, install and promote the use of free and open source software on Software Freedom Day this year in your community – in your neighborhood, in your school and at work.

Share your knowledge and participate in the nearest SFD celebration. Visit the Software Freedom Day website to find out where you can participate in your local area.

Show your support for FOSS and for software freedom.

Software Freedom Day 2008

Mozilla turns 10!

cimg3285.JPGMozilla’s 10th birthday party in SF on March 31st felt like a Netscape reunion. Hundreds of geeks and cat-herders, many with Netscape jackets, shirts, and nostalgia, gathered together to celebrate Mozilla’s phenomenal success. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich and the Mozilla community were all there to party, to enjoy the cake and to be merry. As the galactic chocolate birthday cake was being cut, Mitchell predicted that many opportunities and challenges lay ahead in the next 10 years and that the greatest achievements for Mozilla are yet to come.

Mozilla has millions of reasons to celebrate. After 500 million downloads, Firefox stands tall as the world’s best free and open source web browser. After 500 million downloads, Firefox has single-handedly turned the tables on IE and has prevented Microsoft from closing the Web. Mozilla is Netscape done right.

Life would be almost unimaginable without Firefox.

Way to go! Mozilla. Live long and prosper.

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OSBC 2008: Bringing Television to the Web with Open Source

In another interesting keynote at OSBC by Steven Pearson, VP of Advanced Technologies at CBS Interactive, we learned about how deeply open source is being used in his organization. Almost every online property of CBS – CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com, Last.fm – is using open source for their application requirements, ranging from news simulcasts, live election reporting to connecting users who share similar tastes in music and customizing radio streams.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Lucene, Tomcat, PHP, Spring are among technologies that CBS is using heavily. Open source has offered greater ROI for CBS with increase in speed of development, ease of access to source code and documentation, and the ability to enhance source code when needed. CBS Interactive has also contributed back to several open source projects such as CPAN.

The future of open source is bright at CBS with more and more open source projects for the online services that CBS is offering its audiences. Interestingly, Pearson did not feel that competition with other media organizations such as NBC, ABC, and Fox prevents CBS from contributing to open source projects. After all, having content platforms, made robust through open source practices, for delivering ads helps drive up CBS’s revenues.

GNUnify 2008 – It only gets better!

GNUnify 2008 TeamGNUnify opened with a roar this year! More than a thousand smart developers and hackers, technology-hungry engineering students, foss enthusiasts, international open source gurus and successful entrepreneurs gathered for two days of great tech talks, install fests, hack fests, BOFs and lots of hallway and canteen conversations. The energy throughout the conference was amazing. Every year, I’ve seen this energy rise and add to the momentum of the conference.

Keynote by Chander Kant, Zmanda FounderHarshad and his organizing team did a phenomenal job of covering an excellent range of topics in the conference program – from Mozilla Prism, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, Erlang, Django to visual design tips, network management and security. Every room was packed with spillover seating on the speaker dais. BOFs on IndLinux by Karunakar, LinuxChix India by Runa were well attended. The workshops and hands-on tutorials were packed beyond lab capacities with more than 80-90 attendees in each session. Topics such as mobile Linux, Ruby on Rails were immensely popular and the install fests for Fedora and Mandriva were just plain fun.

Niyam Bhushan's talk on visual designThere were a lot of talks I wanted to attend but could only manage to squeeze into Brian‘s talk on 10 things to know about open source, Niyam’s talk on visual design (really well done), Chander’s talk on building a open source company (great talk!) and David’s MySQL state of the union.

High energy workshops at GNUnify 2008I ended up helping out for the Ruby on Rails workshop by Bob and it was sensational to see 80 keen hackers going through the process of building a Rails application and building an interface to MySQL. Talk about some serious energy, enthusiasm to learn and hack some cool code!

I particularly enjoyed meeting FOSS friends from all over India – from Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Goa and many more places. My congratulations to Harshad, his super team of wonderful volunteers from SICSR’s student community and the tireless Pluggies (Sudhanwa and his team) who put in countless hours of effort and commitment to make GNUnify a rip-roaring success this year. Thanks to Vijay for his great photo coverage of Team GNUnify!

GNUnify just keeps getting better :-) and better every time! Let’s keep it going like the Energizer Bunny!

Uniting Open Minds at GNUnify

I’ve been part of GNUnify for a few years now – this will be my fifth year. It has been a marvelous experience to see the conference grow and gain wide national and international participation. GNUnify is organized by the professors and graduate students of the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) in association with the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) to provide a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge among industry professionals and academia. This year promises to be exciting – with international keynotes, in-depth technical sessions, hands-on workshops on the latest FOSS technologies, install fests and BOFs. Two days of intense discussions, hallway networking, learning about red-hot open source applications, BOF-ing with the gurus and of course enjoying SPDPs. For those who don’t know about the famous “SPDP” – come to GNUnify to find out more about it. Be there on February 8-9, 2008!

Pune’s PLUG Mash a resounding success

PLUG MASHUP CAMPParticipating at PLUG’s mashup camp in October was an exciting opportunity for me to be among friends and Pluggies again.The PLUG Mash organized by the Pune Linux User’s Group and its friends and supporters was a resounding success. The 2-day camp had a combination of formal talks as well as a hack-a-thon for FOSS hackers to gather together and code. Major sponsors including Thoughtworks and Zmanda did an outstanding job of participating in the sessions. I found the talks by various open source contributors – Chris Stevenson (of Thoughtworks), Ramki (of Red Hat), Friji (of Radio Schizoid), Satish (of Red Hat), Valsa (of Intel), KK George (of Zmanda), Niyam (creative guru), and Karunakar (of Indlinux.org) – led to a valuable discussion of how developers, users and FOSS advocates are doing their part in making open source contributions possible from India. I presented about the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and its global initiatives and enjoyed the discussion thereafter about how OSI could become more pertinent in India’s ecosystem.

Many thanks to my friends for putting in a lot of hard work, for being such fantastic hosts and making this 2-day camp in Pune memorable and successful for me. The great conversations, wonderful food, and the “coffee” added just the right touch. And reminded me of what makes Pune’s community so enjoyable to be part of.