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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

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