I’ve been part of GNUnify for a few years now – this will be my fifth year. It has been a marvelous experience to see the conference grow and gain wide national and international participation. GNUnify is organized by the professors and graduate students of the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) in association with the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) to provide a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge among industry professionals and academia. This year promises to be exciting – with international keynotes, in-depth technical sessions, hands-on workshops on the latest FOSS technologies, install fests and BOFs. Two days of intense discussions, hallway networking, learning about red-hot open source applications, BOF-ing with the gurus and of course enjoying SPDPs. For those who don’t know about the famous “SPDP” – come to GNUnify to find out more about it. Be there on February 8-9, 2008!
Pune’s PLUG Mash a resounding success
Participating at PLUG’s mashup camp in October was an exciting opportunity for me to be among friends and Pluggies again.The PLUG Mash organized by the Pune Linux User’s Group and its friends and supporters was a resounding success. The 2-day camp had a combination of formal talks as well as a hack-a-thon for FOSS hackers to gather together and code. Major sponsors including Thoughtworks and Zmanda did an outstanding job of participating in the sessions. I found the talks by various open source contributors – Chris Stevenson (of Thoughtworks), Ramki (of Red Hat), Friji (of Radio Schizoid), Satish (of Red Hat), Valsa (of Intel), KK George (of Zmanda), Niyam (creative guru), and Karunakar (of Indlinux.org) – led to a valuable discussion of how developers, users and FOSS advocates are doing their part in making open source contributions possible from India. I presented about the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and its global initiatives and enjoyed the discussion thereafter about how OSI could become more pertinent in India’s ecosystem.
Many thanks to my friends for putting in a lot of hard work, for being such fantastic hosts and making this 2-day camp in Pune memorable and successful for me. The great conversations, wonderful food, and the “coffee” added just the right touch. And reminded me of what makes Pune’s community so enjoyable to be part of.
Pharma patent loss is a win for healthcare and free software in India
In January 2006, India’s Patent Office rejected a patent application for Gleevec, a leukemia cancer drug by Swiss pharmaceutical Novartis. Now, in August 2007, the Chennai High Court has rejected Novartis’ appeal to overturn this rejection.
Novartis claims that India’s ruling will stunt R&D and innovation in pharmaceuticals and violates WTO intellectual property agreements. But the Indian government sees this decision as helping ensure that affordable medicines continue to be available for her people and those of other developing countries. Such medicines are essential to combat killer diseases like AIDS and cancer. Indian companies manufacture generic Gleevec (known as Glivec in India) for one-tenth the price offered by Novartis.
Why does this matter?
India’s ruling will deter international pharma giants from trying to extend their monopolies by patenting newer versions of existing medicines. This ruling allows India to continue manufacturing inexpensive generic drugs. For example, 85% of AIDS generics to Africa are provided by India’s pharmaceuticals. That’s significant.
This precedent also establishes a model for rejecting software patents in India. The arguments that favor availability of generic medicines equally apply to free and open source software (FOSS). India cannot afford the monopolies and high prices brought about by software patents. FOSS is the only practical way developing nations can afford long-term, large-scale IT automation. Without automation, India and others cannot scale to provide the infrastructure and banking, education and health care needed to ensure prosperity for billions of people across the globe.
Partners may be worse than enemies
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.
iPhoneDevCamp in SF – An absolute hit
The iPhoneDevCamp this weekend (July 7-8) was an absolute hit! The hack-a-thon to develop iPhone applications resulted in 48 apps and websites being demonstrated. Some great collaboration took place! Creative enthusiasts, developers, designers and testers all worked together to have some fun creating neat iPhone Apps. However, FOSS people like me do feel that the iPhone platform should be opened up to encourage lots of useful apps to be developed by talent outside Apple. The web sites and applications created at the hack-a-thon are available here.
My thanks to the organizers – Raven Zachary, Whurley, Chris Allen and other team members for a tremendous job managing logistics, press and the sub-events. And Adobe’s venue was perfect for the camp.
Here is the group photo of some of the attending iPhone owners. I missed it. Hopefully, better luck next time.
iPhone Developers Camp this weekend
Is this cool or what? An iPhoneDevCamp starting today at sundown through Sunday (July 6-8) in San Francisco at Adobe’s offices at 601 Townsend St.
Many companies and individuals have pitched in to make this camp happen. My friend, Danese Cooper said about the camp – “It’s a great example of a spontaneous community forming around really compelling technologies,” in an interview with the SF Chronicle about the upcoming DevCamp.
There are 400+ designers, developers, testers and iPhone owners signed up already. By the end of Sunday, there will be some cool web apps and sites which are even iPhone friendly. If you’re in the area, sign up, bring your laptop or iPhone and join in. See you there this weekend.
The iPhone Phenomenon
The world has changed.
We’ve all been hearing about the iPhone for months now and its finally out. And unexpectedly, while watching the waves of eager customers line up to enter the Apple Store along Palo Alto’s University Blvd., my friends and I got bitten by the iPhone bug too. So there I found myself standing on opening day (June 29), in a line that was surprisingly fast moving, and got myself an iPhone. The gadget is sleek. It’s glamorous and it’s just plain cool. What a beautiful user interface. Very easy. Very, very intuitive. It’s got maps, music, movies, email, weather, stocks, wi-fi, camera, and a quad-band phone – everything a professional needs. The integration of Google maps, YouTube, Yahoo weather, iTunes music and movies is fantastic. This gadget sets new standards for convergence and raises the bar for all handheld devices to aspire to.
The only thing I don’t like is the bundling of a 2 year mandatory phone service contract from AT&T. The user should be able to select their own voice carrier and have more flexible monthly plans available. But, on the positive side, the bundled data service is unmetered. That’s a revolution for the US market. Unrestricted data connectivity will assure iPhone’s success because the network apps and features can be accessed at any and all times without being nickle and dimed to death.
But the iPhone whets my appetite and expands my wish-list for a comparable open source software solution. I want to see an ‘openPhone’ with the same level of integration from the OS to the GUI. Perhaps Red Hat with its ‘mugshot.org‘ will aim to achieve the samelevel of integration from the OS to the GUI. Perhaps Red Hat with its ‘mugshot.org‘ will aim to achieve the same standard of integration and do a ‘Fedora Fone’.
Connecting Eyeballs
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.
Open Invention Network (OIN) visits India
Jerry Rosenthal, CEO of intellectual patents company – Open Invention Network (OIN), was in India last week to interact with technology companies in Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. During its trip, OIN met with leaders in government, the IT industry and with India IP experts to discuss ways Linux can promote innovation as well as how to better protect Linux end-users and developers. Two Indian companies were announced as new licensees of OIN – ClickforHelpIndia.com and Quad One Technologies. ClickforHelpIndia.com is a partnership between ClickforHelp.com of Vienna, Virginia and Sumangala CreativeTech India Pvt. Ltd. (SCTI) of Hyderabad. It offers call center helpdesk services. Quad One Technologies Pvt. Ltd. of Hyderabad provides offshore software consulting services for the healthcare/pharmaceutical industry.
Indian law does not recognize software patents as of now, though it is under tremendous pressure from the WTO to buckle under. Today, Indian IT companies involved in offshoring and outsourcing for US clients are the prime candidates for joining OIN’s license network.
OIN was formed in 2005 by IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. It has more than 100 worldwide patents and patent applications as part of its patent commons. These patents can be licensed royalty-free by companies to provide IP protection to Linux end-users, distributors and developers. OIN, a for-profit company, is one of the many organizations such as the Linux Foundation and SFLC who have set up groups to defend Linux against possible patent attacks. One of OIN’s goals is to evaluate software and hardware Linux-based solutions and potentially acquire, for its patent commons, the IP embodied in the best solutions.
BIS revisits Indian IT standards
The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) held their second seminar on IT standards in Bangalore on April 12 where they seem to have acquired a semblance of political rectitude by including participants and speakers from a wider swath of the industry. In contrast to the first seminar held earlier this year in New Delhi (February 21), they allowed competing industry stakeholders to represent their positions on IT standards. Proponents of the Open Document Format (ODF) such as IBM, Sun, and Red Hat emphasized the need for open, global standards. Microsoft with its Office Open XML (OOXML) standard reiterated Craig Mundie’s message from his talk in Delhi that standards should support interoperability and innovation should be forged through strong IPR.
BIS’s additional director general Rakesh Verma announced the formation of a panel of 30 organizations to work along with BIS to help build IT standards for India. Action items for this panel include identifying relevant international standards documents and creating India-specific standards as needed. One hopes that BIS will keep the process transparent to ensure open dialog and comments by the public and experts at large.
Today the digital world has multiple vendors and multiple standards. From a nation’s point of view, choosing only one standard from among multiple non-universal standards may be premature. However, enforcing interoperability via adopting open formats and promoting a level playing field can ensure that competing standards play together and communicate productively. An open standards development process can only enhance the prospects of interoperability. The government’s interest lies in having all stakeholders compete fairly to protect and support the consumer’s interests.