[GNU/LinuxInIndia] Open Source Event Kicks Off

Open Source Event Kicks Off

Bangalore's open source community crams into conference to learn,
network, and share.
November 24, 2006

Approximately 1,500 attendees turned up Friday for FOSS.in, a free
event in Bangalore that the open source community in India has been
planning for months.

Organizer Atul Chitnis expects a deluge on Saturday. "I don't know how
we'll fit them in," he said with delight. "There are not enough chairs
here and people are standing to listen to the talks."

Mr. Chitnis almost skipped a vegetarian lunch that was served for the
crowd as he waited for more chairs to arrive. In the spirit of the
open source philosophy, he didn't delegate the job to a junior staff
member.

The open source community has been growing in India, but there's no
way to affix a number to it, he said.

Pointing to a stall sponsored by ABB, the Swedish engineering giant,
he said the movement was slowly gathering steam.

"Some of those guys were involved in making this event happen years
ago, and are now working on an open source robotics project," he said.
The ABB folks, in true big corporate style, were cagey but said about
15 people in its India office were working on several open source
projects.

'We see a huge scope for open source to be adopted by small and medium
companies in India.'

 -Gajanana Hegde,
  SpikeSource Software

Christoff Wittig, chief executive of db4objects, based in San Mateo,
California, felt India still had a long way to go in open source
adoption, but he added that companies like his were proof that open
source and business were getting along well together.

Large corporations take time to convince, he said, but they too are
coming around. "Boeing has put us in their aircraft, Seagate has put
us in devices, Intel is using us for factory-flow automation," said
Mr. Wittig. "We have 200 commercial customers and an active community
of 15,000 people who support our products."

As a business model, it works, he said. The cost of putting together a
product is minimal, and support from the community is strong, so a
young company like his can run with just 30 to 50 employees and yet
serve customers in 40 countries.

Mr. Wittig is in India to reach out to the community and meet
potential customers.

IBM and Sun Weigh In

Among the large companies present were IBM and Sun. IBM's Suparna
Bhattacharya, who delivered the keynote address, is among India's most
respected Linux kernel developers.

Sun's Moinak Ghosh is famed in the community for Belenix, an open
source project to compress the 1.8-gigabyte Sun Solaris operating
system to fit onto a 700-megabyte compact disc.

"We see a huge scope for open source to be adopted by small and medium
companies in India," said Gajanana Hegde, vice president at
SpikeSource Software, a company that's putting together supportable
middleware stacks for use in the enterprise.

Some state governments such as those in Kerala and West Bengal are
pushing for open source adoption in schools and within their offices.

The state-owned Center for Development of Advanced Computing is
working on several initiatives for local-language operating systems
and software: a speech-enabled operating system, Indian-language
software for the visually challenged, and OpenOffice in Indian
languages for enterprises and others.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the Danish-Canadian programmer who wrote the first two
versions of the PHP (personal home page) programming language, is in
Bangalore for FOSS.

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language for quickly setting up
dynamic web pages. Sulamita Garcia, the young founder of the LinuxChix
project in Brazil, was also at the conference.

Contact the writer: [email protected]
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