Mission FOSS

Linux Bangalore is back as FOSS.IN, India's biggest open source developer
conference. Amid heated discourses on open source adoption and paradigm shifts,
involving migration from proprietary to open regimes and the hurdles therein,
two FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) pioneers in India are taking the open
source movement a few steps further. The National Resource Centre for FOSS (NRC
FOSS), piloted by CDAC-Chennai and the AU-KBC Research Centre attached to Anna
University, Chennai, already has 50 colleges on its rolls since its launch in
June.

The NRC FOSS portal (nrcfoss.org.in) is scheduled to go
online in about two months, with technical assistance from Satyam Computer. The
portal will reside on the servers of CDAC-Pune. The Department of Information
Technology currently funds the NRC FOSS project. The portal will be a medium for
resource sharing among educational institutions, technical collaborators, and
open source developers addressing ways of bridging the digital divide.

Shedding light on the open source evangelization efforts of
Anna University over the past few years, Dr S Srinivasan, project scientist with
the AU-KBC Research Center, attached to Anna University, says that NRC FOSS has
aimed at introducing two FOSS electives, lab classes and student projects in the
BE/MCA/MSc curricula of selected colleges under Anna University and affiliated
institutions.

"Setting up NRC FOSS as a nodal body is now helping us
consolidate our open source education and training activities under a common
umbrella, with strong support from CDAC-Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Pune.
We look forward to showcasing open source projects by engineering students from
the colleges we are associated with, and look for industry niches where they
will fit in," says Srinivasan.

Lack of trained manpower, standardization, and coordination
between government, state, and industry stakeholders are the main constraints
holding back largescale growth and localization of FOSS-based technologies, said
experts at FOSS.IN. They believe that the evolution of Web 2.0 will be a key
enabler in promoting open source software via the Internet. Web 2.0 is
transforming much of the software business by delivering it, as a service, and
large parts of the software, which is enabling this to happen, is free and open.
Both the necessity and the opportunities exist for this transformation to breed
a new generation of successful FOSS-oriented businesses.

Talent transformation, on the other hand, will begin in the
colleges. Besides injecting key FOSS entries into the engineering curricula,
bodies like NRC FOSS and Ind-Linux.org have been keen to develop generic robust
middleware based on open source, which will be relevant for schools, SMEs as
well as e-governance domains. The government of Maharashtra has pledged to
incorporate open source software and middleware in its e-governance programs
across the state.

"Many people don't know where to use open source or
how to implement and assemble open source stacks when necessary. We have to
spread awareness on the why and how of open source by starting with the
colleges," opines Dr Srinivasan. He is currently piloting open source
projects in 50 colleges in Tamil Nadu, which include the SSN College of
Engineering, Chennai, and Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering at
Sriperumbudur.

NRC FOSS aims to train at least 100 teachers from these 50
colleges, and in the process, create 3,000 engineers or MCA graduates every
year. "RT enhancements and embedded systems still require a corporate
systems environment to develop, port, and test, but these are future growth
areas for FOSS, which NRC FOSS will concentrate on, once we have a sizeable
brain bank of open source projects," adds Dr Srinivasan.

NRC FOSS and CDAC will eventually bring specialist
certifications for Linux and open source under their ambit for college students
once the program extends to over 300 colleges in India.

The CDACs have been notable for their initiatives to
proliferate the use of Indian languages in Information Technology. CDAC-Hyderabad
has, with corporate support, developed Unicode standard-based Indian language
support for Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi, which are browser and database independent
solution. Hindi fonts, for example, comes with Hindi Unicode-compliant keyboard
driver, the BharateeyaOO.o fonts in Hindi, a Firefox browser, e-mail client,
dictionary, spellchecker, and other generic fonts code and storage code
converters. CDAC-Hyderabad has also developed e-Sikshak, an e-learning
environment with built-in course organizer, assessor, Indian language interface,
and collaborative tools to facilitate distance learning.

With the advent of clustering technologies and the growing
acceptance of FOSS in the enterprise datacenter, supercomputers can now be
created at a fraction of the cost of traditional high-performance machines. C-DAC
lead the way here too with Linux cluster PARAMNet-II based on CISC, RISC, and
EPIC architecture-based processors. C-DAC, in collaboration with IIT-Mumbai, is
the project-implementing agency for the ICT Research and Training Centre in
Bangalore.

On the enterprise side, the patch management process for
Linux is something the critics have panned for long. It is something Linux
development companies could address and profit from. The next generation of
start-ups will come up with solutions in this domain. Besides, with wider
circulation of the certification regime in engineering colleges to be a key area
for organizations like CDAC and NRC FOSS, will be the key to further innovating
and idiot-proofing Linux.

The opportunity lies in pages of the college textbooks, much
as it does in the rapidly opening Linux server and apps market; and, as it does
in sophisticated Linux cluster applications involving computational fluid
dynamics, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and structural mechanics. Ask Dr
Srinivasan.

Ravi Menon