SFD 2009
Today is Software Freedom Day. India’s FOSS community has organized install fests, software demos and talks to promote free and open source software across the nation. University FOSS clubs, Linux User Groups (LUGs) and Open Source User Groups (OSUMs) have been organizing grass-root gatherings all week.
Coverage from some of these events includes:
It’s pretty exciting to see so much activity. Hope to see even more schools and colleges participate next year. Happy SFD 2009!
The Art of Community Management (Credit for image: Lumaxart at www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart)
Code, collaboration and community are the pillars of open source. Every successful open source software project has an active community around it that reflects the project’s priorities and character. Since the core concern of most open source projects is code, their communities are typically focused on developers and on producing good code.
But other areas also important. Many open source software communities also look at tools and infrastructure to support the community’s needs as well as ways to create marketing buzz and how to grow and maintain a healthy ecosystem for users. One of the signs of a successful community is the emergence of a community manager who fits the outreach needs of the project.
In its LQ Community Manager Interview Series, LinuxQuestions.org has published a series of excellent interviews with some of the community managers of popular Linux distributions — Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora. These interviews highlight the strengths that each community manager brings to their particular project.
Here are the three interviews:
Ubunchu - A Ubuntu Manga Comic Book (Credit: Ubunchu)
Earlier this month, Ubunchu, a comic book for Ubuntu, was published in Japanese. Ubunchu is about three students in a sysadmin club who are learning about Ubuntu. Japanese Manga artist (Mangaka) Hiroshi Seo is the creator of this comic series and his first edition has already been translated into English, French, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese. Translated versions can be found here.
The comic book format has become an interesting, if novel, way to popularize technology. For example, when Google released Chrome, it introduced its new browser accompanied by a wildly popular comic book. I believe this format could also help kids in middle school and high school learn about the latest technologies like Linux and open source.
Calling on our Indian language localizers… Are you ready to translate Ubunchu? Ubunchu comes with a Creative Commons license and has the SVG source available too. So it should be easy to translate and spread the word.
And here is what Hiroshi says to translators…
For translators:
- If your are planning to translate the manga into another language, my consent is not required, for it is released under Creative Commons BY-NC license. Though I’d really appreciate if you let me know it when it’s done. Then I would add the link of the distribution site to the list above.
- Both English version’s are distributed with it’s SVG sources. You will find it very easy to edit with SVG editing software like Inkscape. Thanks to DoctorMO & C-quel’s work! When using these sources, please don’t forget to add the credit for them.
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.
Red Hat’s CEO James Whitehurst is currently on his first trip to India since he took over from Matthew Szulik last December. Whitehurst is to meet with top industry and government leaders. He is also scheduled to meet with members of the open source community as well as famous academics such as Dr. Deepak Phatak of IIT Bombay.
In an interview in Mumbai, Whitehurst hoped that open source software adoption would continue to grow as more e-governance projects are sanctioned. India’s central government continues to increase its investment to make IT services accessible to a larger percentage of people in rural and small town communities. Red Hat India continues to focus on growing Linux and open source deployment in four key markets in India – government, BFSI, telecom and education.
Localization and Open Standards
Other areas that Whitehurst sees as big ticket items for India are local language localization and adoption of open standards. Both these areas are crucial for supporting large e-governance projects. Red Hat India continues to make serious contributions to language localization by incorporating support for 11 Indian languages in RHEL and Fedora. Languages that are fully supported include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Telegu and Tamil. Whitehurst reiterated the need for localization in helping reduce the digital-divide in India.
Whitehurst highlighted Red Hat’s efforts to promote open standards as a dynamic that could change society in the long run. Red Hat has made significant headway in lobbying for adoption of open standards by the central government. India voted against OOXML in favor of ODF earlier this year at ISO. However, despite objections against OOXML, it was approved by ISO as an international standard in August. Appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela that stemmed from irregularities surrounding the approval process were rejected by ISO.
India’s Fedora Community
Whitehurst also praised the Indian Fedora community for actively working on Fedora. India has the third largest group of contributors to the Fedora project. 26 contributors (many of whom work for Red Hat India) are listed on the Fedora project wiki.
Greg Kroah-Hartman of SuSE Labs along with Jon Corbet of LWN.net and the Linux Foundation just published a very informative state of the union of the Linux Kernel development world.
The kernel is one of the largest collaborative software projects on the planet. According to this report, over 3700 individual developers from over 200 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005. That’s amazing!
I found a couple of very interesting facts in their report – the top 30 contributors and the top 30 organizations sponsoring kernel development.
The top 30 contributors include:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)
The top sponsors of Linux Kernel development are:
(Reference: Linux Kernel Development Report)
And its pretty cool to learn from the report that 70% of all kernel developers are now getting paid to do what they enjoy the most!
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst delivered the first keynote of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco with a state of the union on Red Hat’s leadership in open source – $500 million dollars in revenues, millions of servers, thousands of customers. Whitehurst highlighted Red Hat’s leadership in the Linux market with 80 percent marketshare with RHEL and 30 percent of the application server market with JBoss. His speech sounded like it was being delivered to “shareholders” of open source.
The new CEO is not quite 90 days into his job. But he’s been all around the globe – meeting customers, heads of government and policy makers in China, Russia, and Europe. He feels that open source is gaining more popularity internationally due to anti-US sentiment.
Whitehurst explained that one of Red Hat’s key challenges is to bring the value of the open source community development model to enterprise customers. For example, the “oVirt” project for building management tools around virtualization is helping Red Hat engage enterprise customers as participants in building these tools together. Another challenge is for Red Hat to be the defining company of open source for the 21st century – by changing the way technology is developed through “iterative innovation”. Patent reform is one of the biggest issues that Red Hat is currently facing and he hoped to see a broader strategy of protecting the whole community instead of just focusing on individual companies.
Sun Microsystems announced today that it will buy MySQL for a billion dollars, paying off the MySQL founders and investors.
For only a billion dollars… Now, that’s a steal, don’t you think? If MySQL had gone IPO perhaps they could’ve raised 5 billion dollars or more – I believe they could have because the open source market is only growing stronger. On the same day, Oracle announced its acquisition of BEA for 8.5 billion dollars – just for acquiring market share. So a billion dollars for MySQL seems cheap.
How does this affect Linux? Sun has marketed open source initiatives such as OpenSolaris, Netbeans, GlassFish and OpenOffice. Now MySQL joins that list. MySQL is a key player in the Linux solution set. Linux could benefit if MySQL is provided with more resources to help build more powerful open source solutions. Linux could be hurt if MySQL becomes more encumbered and less free.
2008 promises to be an interesting year for open source. Let’s hope Sun will play to its strengths of great engineering and innovation and support the entire open source community. This means Linux too.
Some interesting comments on this acquisition:
1) Glyn Moody
2) Groklaw
3) Matt Asay
4) Motley Fool
An intriguing article by Fortune Magazine on Microsoft’s China strategy reveals how Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy officer was deployed by Bill Gates in 1999 to fix the company’s problems with the Chinese market and its government. Mundie turned around Microsoft’s strategy from short-term to long-term engagement – one from antagonism to partnership. Mundie even hired famous China lobbyist Henry Kissinger as advisor.
Bill Gates is quoted in the article, “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not… You can get the real thing, and you get the same price.” After walking hand in hand with China’s leadership, Microsoft’s alliance with officialdom is but a short term gain. Arrogance, Microsoft’s true partner, is the enemy of progress. In the long run it will only blind Microsoft to the paradigm shift that open source signifies.
In his keynote at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at Google, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth focused on the importance of collaboration. For Mark, collaboration inspires innovation and tools and processes that help collaboration are key to maintaining the edge of innovation in FOSS. I couldn’t agree with Mark more. Mark observed that barriers to collaboration include too many interfaces to communicate with, rigid community structure management, attitudes of “us vs. them”, poor project management, and insufficient standardization. He said that while there are many collaboration techniques and tools WITHIN global open source projects, there are not many ACROSS these projects. Many of his efforts try to connect islands of eyeballs through the tools the Ubuntu community is building – Launchpad, Bazaar, Rosetta, UbuntuForums. Otherwise, a lack of tools and standards across projects are hampering bug tracking, submission of translations & patches and testing. He cited the GNOME project as a great example of communication across projects especially in helping downstream developers.