Category Archives: OpenSource

Scilab workshop for teachers at Bhaskaracharya Institute of Mathematics

Scilab workshop at BP

The Bhaskaracharya Institute of Mathematics in Pune is organizing full-day workshops on Scilab specifically targeted for teachers.

This program is organized jointly by BP and IIT Bombay. Prof. Katre and Manjusha Joshi of BP have been prime movers in organizing these workshops and activists in spreading the use of open source software for mathematics analysis and research at BP.

These workshops are to be held from 4-7 July from 10am to 5pm. The targeted audience is teachers from colleges under Pune University and Mumbai University and aim to cover various aspects of Scilab, which is part of the undergraduate (BCS) syllabus.

BP has been instrumental in organizing other open source software workshops and conferences such as PLUGMash 2007 with the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) .

Are you ready to Ubunchu!

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.

GSoC 2009 – India Participates in Global Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2009

In five years, Google’s Summer of Code program has grown open source awareness as well as built contributors on a global scale. The GSoC 2009 program has announced its list of students for this year’s projects. 1000 students from 70 countries have been selected to work with mentors on over 150 open source projects. The top 5 countries include the US with 212 students, India with 101 students, Germany with 55 students, Canada with 44 students and Brazil with 43 students. India sent in 610 applications from which 101 were selected.

One of my favorite projects Fedora has accepted two Indian students – Satya Komaragiri to work on a WYSIWYG DocBook editor for Fedora documentation and Atul Agarwal to work on an Instant Mirror for Fedora. The GNOME project has accepted one Indian student – Ishan Chattopadhyaya working on Anjuta-Python integration. Other projects with Indian students include Drupal, Eclipse, XWiki, Sahana and SugarLabs. Find out more details on the gsoc-india group.

A focused, incentive based program like GSoC attracts smart students from developing countries. It is a great way to engage budding contributors in open source software projects. But let’s not forget that programs like GSoC must be combined with sustained local efforts in order to create lasting contributors. We need to encourage and organize local activities including open source labs, curricula changes, mentoring programs, development of training material and teacher training. Then India’s participation in open source can only grow.

Technology Leaders Welcome US CTO Aneesh Chopra

US CTO Announced

Aneesh Chopra is the first US Federal Chief Technology Officer. He’s 37 years old, a Harvard graduate, a successful CTO at the state level, and an American of Indian origin. A crescendo of praise for this new star is rising. But it is also raising up every technology leader’s wish-list for fresh consideration by the top US technology policy and implementation machinery. From big bloggers like Tim O’Reilly to Intel’s Craig Barrett to VC Vinod Khosla, everyone has admiration… and expectations.

Mr. Chopra is reported to understand the power of today’s new trends in the technology ecosystem – collaboration, open content and the Internet. He‘s in a position to make wise choices among competing IT agendas, where both action and vision matter. Let’s hope he applies the best information technologies to the real problems he’s mandated to solve. For the benefit of all of us.

India Election Mashups Web 2.0 Style

India Election Mashups

India engages in the important ritual of democracy – an Indian general election — every five years. This ritual will be held from April 16 through May 13, 2009 when all 543 seats of the lower house of the Indian Parliament known as the Lok Sabha are up for grabs.

714 million voters, 828,804 polling stations and boatloads of money spent to engage in this process.

The Indian subsidiaries of two of the largest global web companies – Google India and Yahoo India have launched two mashups in Web 2.0 style. Both sites do a good job of educating the English speaking voters of India on the latest in election news, analysis, voting myths, election abbreviations and symbols, and polling schedules. The sites have some interactive features such as maps, polls to understand the citizens’ priorities on issues such as infrastructure, power, water, jobs, economy and national security. The sites personalize data based on the voter’s location and permit searching voter rolls to find your polling booth.

These mashups could be even more helpful if they were provided in local languages. The non-English speaking majority of voters in India would benefit by access to modern and unbiased election information services. Hopefully next time an Indian startup will see the opportunity to help inform and build a nation!

Check out the Yahoo! mashup here and the Google mashup here.

Showcasing Code in Silicon Valley

CodeCon 2009

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent has been organizing a peer-to-peer applications unconference named “CodeCon” in San Francisco since 2002. Pulled together by Bram Cohen and Len Sassaman, the unconference demonstrates bleeding edge software apps and allows programmers to show off their coding prowess.

After a hiatus for a couple of years, Bram has now restarted the conference. Applications that’ll be showcased include effortless BitTorrent deployment with BitTorrent DNA, a distributed transaction layer for Google App Engine, a trend profiler for C/C++, and a parallel web browser for handhelds and multicore laptops. In addition, a BioHack track will demonstrate cool biotechnology apps.

For programmers in the Valley who are interested in the latest peer-to-peer applications, CodeCon definitely is a place to be. CodeCon will be held from April 17-19, 2009 at CellSpace on 2050 Bryant Street in San Francisco. The program can be found here.

Gaining Political Capital for Open Source in India

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.

Ruby on Rails in Hyderabad

Twincling RoR session on March 14th

Twincling Technology Foundation is organizing a half-day “Ruby on Rails” technology session on March 14th, 2009 in Hyderabad. This session will be conducted by Technetra’s Robert Adkins, an expert developer in Ruby and Ruby on Rails and an active open source contributor.

This tech session will be an introduction and tutorial on Rails.

The session will start with an overview of the Rails system and will look at the diverse community that is making Rails so successful today. It will examine conventional Rails program structure and configuration and will cover database migrations and the three most important components: Active Record, Action Controller, and Action View. It will also discuss integration with CSS and Ajax as well as review topics such as testing, security and performance.

Check for further details about the session and registration at Twincling.

Today is International Women’s Day

International Womens Day is March 8

International Women’s Day on March 8 celebrates the many achievements of women all over the world. This day symbolizes the positive changes that are happening in every walk of life for women – in education, in healthcare, in business, in government, in politics and in technology.

But more needs to be done. I’d like to see more women participate in open source as users, developers, contributors, catalysts, managers and educators. More women should develop software, design software and promote its use for social change or for success in business.

Here is a list of women in open source that my friend Kirrily Roberts at Geek Feminism started last year. All women in open source are welcome to join.

In this coming year, let us try harder to get our women colleagues, friends, sisters, daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers to learn more about open source and how it can be an agent of change in our communities.

GNUnify 2009: Community Support Matters

GNUnify 2009

I’ve been supporting GNUnify in Pune for many years now. And every year it has been great to see the deep support of local organizations like the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), Pune Tech and others.

GNUnify has come a long way. It started off as a small college festival in 2003 and has blossomed into a full-fledged technology conference today that represents the diverse and talented free and open source community of Pune. In an earlier era, while I was organizing LinuxAsia in Delhi, I was happy that I could help Harshad Gune, the key mover behind Gunefy, er… GNUnify, to grow the conference by having key players in the global open source community participate, speak and mentor at GNUnify. I’m proud to have been able to get many of my open source colleagues and friends including David Axmark of MySQL, Brian Behlendorf of Apache, Louis Suarez Potts of OpenOffice, Danese Cooper of OSI, Zaheda Bhorat from Google, Bob Adkins of Technetra, Matt Barker from Ubuntu, Chander Kant of Zmanda, Tony Wasserman of CMU and others to participate locally and help GNUnify grow. In addition, India’s FOSS community poured in their support in the form of speakers, participants, and mentors. That’s why I consider GNUnify to be a serious community contribution to growing open source and collaboration.

This year was another step in the right direction. I was excited when I met with Seth Bindernagel at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View and he agreed that it would be great to pull together a Mozilla Camp at the conference. Seth and his colleague Arun Ranganathan came all the way from California to deliver a fantastic Mozilla Day at the conference. It was also an opportunity for members of Mozilla’s India localization volunteer team to meet, discuss and make things happen for Firefox.

Another project that I was happy to see participate this year was Fedora India. The Fedora Activity Days (FAD) at GNUnify were a high energy effort that pulled together India’s Fedora team. I thank my friends at Red Hat, especially Sankarshan, for making this happen. FAD mentored and inspired developers and students interested in learning and participating more in the Fedora project.

It was also good to see the diversity in the technology program at the conference this year. Other workshops and talks that I thought were well done included Bob’s workshop on “Ruby from Basics” which had more than 70 hands-on participants (wow!), Rajesh’s “Programming with OpenOffice.org” workshop, Bain’s talk on git, Namita’s talk on ext4 filesystems, Dexter’s talk on WordPress tips and tricks “Blog A Way”, Pradeepto’s “Hello World – the KDE way”, and Navin’s talk on FREEconomics: the economics of free open/source. My talk on “User As Contributor: Best Practices For Growing Open Source User Communities” had lots of interaction on how and where FOSS users can contribute to growing the adoption of open source in their local communities, using local languages and locally relevant applications.

A new session at GNUnify this time was the Frequently Used Entries for Localization (FUEL) session which brought together a small but dedicated group (Rajesh Ranjan, Sandeep Shedmake, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, G. Karunakar) working on accurate translations for Marathi localization.

Another new program at GNUnify this year was “FOSS in Academics“. The session perhaps could have been better organized and better attended, but then this reflected the reality that technology education in India is by and large FOSS ignorant and unaware of many of the changes sweeping through the software world. As the need to provide FOSS-ready talent to the Indian IT industry grows, the urgency to incorporate FOSS in education is expected to follow. Its good to see GNUnify try its hand at FOSS in Academics. It might start a trend!

Alolita Sharma

Software Engineering, Open Source, Open Standards, Observability, Search, Language Technologies, Culture