Twincling’s Open Source Summit ’08: Contributing to Open Source

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Twincling Open Source Summit 2008

Cool technology, hacking code, phenomenal energy — that’s the upcoming Twincling Open Source Summit in Hyderabad.

Over the last few years it’s been fantastic to see the growing energy around open source software in Hyderabad resulting from the dedicated efforts of the Twincling Technology Foundation. This year, Twincling is organizing its 2-day Open Source Summit on December 13-14 at the beautiful IIIT Campus in Gachibowli. The agenda includes in-depth sessions on open source technologies like KDE, Git, Hadoop, OpenSUSE and Gentoo. Plus, the second day will have hands-on workshops by Intel engineers on Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and openMP. There also will be sessions on open source Web 2.0 frameworks, virtualization, networking, operating systems and multi-core software development technologies.

At Twincling events, I’ve come to expect a high level of participation from attendees, high quality discussions, and good technology sessions. Earlier this year, I conducted the Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum organized by Twincling. I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the local developer community. They are eager to build software and start-ups based on open source tools and techniques.

At this year’s Open Source Summit, developers can expect to learn about the latest in open source software, share their knowledge and, as always, network with peers. So mark your calendars for December 13-14 (Saturday-Sunday) and participate at the summit. Don’t miss this opportunity to join in the excitement.

ISRO’s GIS software: Indigenous but not Open Source

The announcement in today’s Express India on new GIS software to be released by India’s Space Research Organization (ISRO) caught my eye. The article describes how ISRO’s Space Applications Centre (SAC) in partnership with Scanpoint Geomatics of Ahmedabad is all set to release a geomatics application – Indigenous GIS and IP Software (IGIS).

Express India and Scanpoint are proud to announce that this effort will result in the first Indian software package for geomatics. The application uses GIS data, images, and GPS real time information to perform satellite image processing. It runs on Unix and Windows NT.

IGIS promises to save ISRO millions of dollars in licensing fees for 3rd party geomatics software. It is also expected to help grow India’s local GIS software product industry.

Noble goals but using an old approach.

The technology architecture of IGIS, as presented on Scanpoint’s website, left me puzzled as to why a taxpayer funded project did not consider open source software as a viable model for development.

Instead IGIS seems to have been built with a proprietary product model in mind. Its software components – map explorer, image processing and GIS modules, geodata databases, map browser, and web application server – all standard fare are built with the old-fashioned assumption that IGIS can be yet another proprietary product that ISRO can somehow license and sell to others. But closed software models have rarely worked in the past for any kind of indigenous software. Also proprietary software that involves relatively standard components is extremely difficult to build in a clean room environment. So due diligence would demand a health check for IP integrity.

Why would a taxpayer funded agency such as ISRO not use the power of open source to

  1. Build on the shoulders of giants. ISRO can take advantage of high quality, open source technologies. It is prohibitively expensive to reach the same breadth and depth of quality through silo’ed development efforts. Using open source could provide substantial up-front savings for ISRO.
  2. Use collaboration methodologies. This can help grow IGIS’ developer and user communities.
  3. Market the software virally with the power of the internet. Once “viral marketing” establishes an interested and engaged market, the strategy of adding customized components, providing technical services and support, and even packaging can become the basis for a thriving revenue model. If ISRO or Scanpoint want to make money off this software, open source is a proven way to go. Think MySQL, Red Hat, Alfresco, Zmanda.

It is not to late for ISRO to consider this model:

  • It could save ISRO tens of millions of dollars in development and licensing costs.
  • It could give ISRO the ability to build a global community of developers and users.

Old habits are hard to break but closed software products are old news. Today national level government supported software projects are well advised to consider open source models to control costs, build high quality software and to realize the potential of the “indigenous” brand.

Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst in India

Red Hat’s CEO James Whitehurst is currently on his first trip to India since he took over from Matthew Szulik last December. Whitehurst is to meet with top industry and government leaders. He is also scheduled to meet with members of the open source community as well as famous academics such as Dr. Deepak Phatak of IIT Bombay.

In an interview in Mumbai, Whitehurst hoped that open source software adoption would continue to grow as more e-governance projects are sanctioned. India’s central government continues to increase its investment to make IT services accessible to a larger percentage of people in rural and small town communities. Red Hat India continues to focus on growing Linux and open source deployment in four key markets in India – government, BFSI, telecom and education.

Localization and Open Standards

Other areas that Whitehurst sees as big ticket items for India are local language localization and adoption of open standards. Both these areas are crucial for supporting large e-governance projects. Red Hat India continues to make serious contributions to language localization by incorporating support for 11 Indian languages in RHEL and Fedora. Languages that are fully supported include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Telegu and Tamil. Whitehurst reiterated the need for localization in helping reduce the digital-divide in India.

Whitehurst highlighted Red Hat’s efforts to promote open standards as a dynamic that could change society in the long run. Red Hat has made significant headway in lobbying for adoption of open standards by the central government. India voted against OOXML in favor of ODF earlier this year at ISO. However, despite objections against OOXML, it was approved by ISO as an international standard in August. Appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela that stemmed from irregularities surrounding the approval process were rejected by ISO.

India’s Fedora Community

Whitehurst also praised the Indian Fedora community for actively working on Fedora. India has the third largest group of contributors to the Fedora project. 26 contributors (many of whom work for Red Hat India) are listed on the Fedora project wiki.

Celebrate Software Freedom Day on 20 September

Transparency is key in enabling people to participate in the creation of wealth and well-being in society. In the past decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has become one of the major catalysts in increasing transparency by lowering the barrier to access the best software technologies. Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebrates this important role of FOSS in making this change happen globally.

Educate, distribute, install and promote the use of free and open source software on Software Freedom Day this year in your community – in your neighborhood, in your school and at work.

Share your knowledge and participate in the nearest SFD celebration. Visit the Software Freedom Day website to find out where you can participate in your local area.

Show your support for FOSS and for software freedom.

Software Freedom Day 2008

Google’s Indic Transliteration tool is pretty neat

While browsing through Google Labs‘ latest inventions, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Google India Labs site with this neat tool for Indic transliteration from English to 5 major Indian languages – Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. The Hindi transliterator converts Roman characters to Devanagari characters. Of course it assumes that you can type “Hinglish” but the tool produces pretty accurate results. And it supports Google services such as Blogger and Orkut which are very popular in India. I’d love to see this tool integrated into GDocs for creating Hindi and other Indian language documents, presentations, spreadsheets. It would be a really useful tool for local language word processing and developing digital content. An API for transliteration of websites is available and its documentation can be found here. If you’re an open source Indic language whiz, check this tool out and provide feedback at google-india-labs@googlegroups.com

OSCON 2008: 10 years of Open Source, Open Web Foundation, and Microsoft joins Apache Software Foundation

OSCON2008 rang in 10 years of the Open Source Definition along with the 10th anniversary of OSCON. Open Source has come a long way in the last decade. The flag bearers of open source – Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python – have matured and are now mainstream. This wealth of open source tools, technologies, and applications was well represented in OSCON’s sessions and discussions.

Sessions I liked

There were some excellent talks highlighting the adoption of open source models and technologies in education, political campaign and voting software, media such as NPR and BBC. The sessions on education, IPR & FOSS economics and women in technology were of special interest to me.

The panel discussion on “Changing Education… Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula” presented initiatives from Africa such as African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) and Chisimba. According to Derek Keats of the University of the Western Cape, Chisimba, a local open source project was specifically launched to teach communication, collaboration and coding skills necessary to participate effectively in global open source projects as well as support local requirements. I feel India’s universities could significantly succeed in their goal to produce effective contributors to FOSS, if similar models were adopted. Without having the need to support local requirements (i.e. itch to scratch), it is difficult to develop any open source software locally or produce significant contributors.

I enjoyed Pia Waugh’s talk on “Heroes: Women in FOSS” where she presented the typical stereotypes that women face in technology jobs and best practices for motivating young women early on (grades 8-12) to get into programming and science in Australia. She talked about OLPC being a great platform to get kids to learn to develop using FOSS.

The panel discussion on “Open Source, Open World” provided an unfiltered view of FOSS adoption across the world. Open standards and open source have been intertwined in the past year as the politically charged ODF / OOXML battle has pulled almost every country into the debate at ISO. Nnenna Nwakanma of FOSSFA Africa talked about how bitter the open standards battle has been in Africa with tremendous pressure from large corporations to get OOXML ratified by ISO. Rishab Ghosh of UNU Merit provided an excellent overview of the EU evaluation of open standards and adoption of open source in government. Bruno Souza of Brazil provided an update on pressures imposed on the government ministeries to influence the OOXML vote. I presented a brief report on the tremendous pressure put on committee participants and central government ministeries in India as it voted against OOXML. Another key area discussed was FOSS in education. I talked about FOSS in college curricula being critical to successfully build a sustainable open source ecosystem to create contributors and software. This panel was one of those rare discussions at OSCON that provided a global perspective on real challenges to FOSS adoption. After this panel discussion, I ran across this map showing participants at OSCON to be mostly from the US and Europe. And it seemed to reflect the reality of many lop-sided discussions that happen in technology (even in open source) with minimal representation from the rest of the world.

Tectonic shifts

A key announcement at the conference was that of the formation of the Open Web Foundation (OWF). This non-profit foundation aims to protect and help development of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. David Recordon, a founder of OWF outlined the foundation’s goals in this presentation.

And to do its open source good deed of the year, Microsoft announced its platinum sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) by pledging to donate $100,000 every year to support Apache development. Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Platform Strategy had an announcement on his blog. ASF put out the following statement on www.apache.org -

“The Apache Software Foundation welcomes Microsoft as a Platinum Sponsor
At OSCON, Microsoft announced their sponsorship of The Apache Software Foundation, joining Google and Yahoo! at Platinum level. The generous contributions by Sponsoring organizations and individuals help offset the day-to-day operating expenses to advance the work of The ASF.”

Here is what Michael Tiemann of the OSI had to say about the announcement and on what Microsoft should can do for open source. I agree with him about what they can start with, namely:

  1. Pursue the abolition of software patents with the same zeal they showed in their (Microsoft’s) efforts to get OOXML approved as a standard.
  2. Unilaterally promise to not use the DMCA to maintain control of their Trusted Computing Platform.
  3. Transition to 100% open standards (as defined by the OSI, IETF, W3C, or the Digistan).
  4. Stop trying to maintain their monopolies by illegal, anti-competitive means [1] [2].

Actions demonstrate intent and direction. Let us see what Microsoft will do positively with the open source community in action. Let us see which way the wind blows.

44 apps over a weekend at SF iPhoneDevCamp2

iPhoneDevCamp2Every year, the hack-a-thon at iPhoneDevCamp is a superb example of collaboration, team effort and hacking code. Chris Allen has been a fantastic mentor for many participants hacking code at the DevCamp and this camp was no exception. This time around, a couple of days of huddling and coding produced some amazing results – 44 iPhone applications based on big ideas and small ideas from open source dev tools to games and social apps. The hack-a-thon brought together teams of people who had never met each other before the conference started. Two days of intense collaboration, communication and coding (sounds like open source doesn’t it!) culminated in demos of these applications that were judged by a panel of experts for categories of best 90 minute app, best open source app, coolest app, most useful app, best developer tool, most educational app, best social app, best game, best web app. Our team of five worked on developing a multiplayer version of “Rock, Scissors, Paper” and appropriately named it RSPRoyale. Our team gave a good demo. We plan to work further on the app and hopefully make it available through the iTunes AppStore. The unconference happening simultaneously had a lot of interesting talks as well. By the evening, once the demos were conducted, the best apps in each contest category were announced and awarded some cool prizes – an iPhone 3G, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, JBL speakers, VMWare Fusion, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, Apple Store gift certificates. A group photo of the DevCamp community with the satellite groups visible online on the background screens was one of the highlights of the whole event. I congratulate the organizers (Raven, Dom, Chris, Blake) who put this camp together and the community. It was a great experience of team building, some serious coding and lots of fun.

SF iPhoneDevCamp2 in full swing

iPhoneDevCamp2August 1 Evening: The camp started with more than 300 people attending the opening session on Friday evening to get started. People discussed app ideas, development plans and formed teams. iPhone users ranging from developers to user interface specialists and even photographers joined in to brainstorm. The organizing team (thanks Raven & Dom), volunteers and Adobe staff were exceptionally helpful to participants coming in. A lot of energy and high spirits. I was impressed with the number of sponsors (60+ sponsors) and supporters for the DevCamp, all interested in encouraging this open community around the iPhone phenomenon.

August 2 Morning: It is Saturday morning now and the DevCamp is already buzzing with activity. After breakfast, sponsors were introduced briefly by Raven and Dominic. Right now, the keynote forum with Merlin Mann is in progress. Mann, introduced as a “maker of fun” and iPhone evangelist, talked about the excitement the iPhone has generated and a major itch to scratch according to him has been “email”. Mike Lee of Tapulous and Brian Fling of Leaflets are the other two keynoters. Fling talked about the new version of Safari and leveraging the latest features to build interfaces for the iPhone. When the panel was asked about the some of the killer apps that make the iPhone really worthwhile, they listed Surfline.com, iChat, Twitterific, Games, Safari and Remote. The keynoters also discussed about were killer interactions that make iPhone apps highly usable, user habits (i.e. how do users use the iPhone vs. iPod / iTouch), interactivity of web apps and making UIs friendly and usable on iPhones. Usability suggestions included not having to scroll up and down unnecessarily, having short sequences to perform actions, remove splash screens from apps, not using video on splash screens especially on games. The last part of the forum is Q&A between the participants and keynoters. Interestingly, user interfaces that got flagged by users as needing improvement for iPhone like interfaces included Amazon.com, and some Google services.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 this weekend in SF

iPhoneDevCamp2The iPhone 3G was launched on July 11 (only 20 days ago) and Apple sold a million units in the first 3 days. I got my 3G on launch day. And this time the lines were even longer (cheaper phone, more demand) while unlucky customers faced a network infrastructure jammed with simultaneous requests to set up AT&T contracts for each phone. Despite initial difficulties, iPhone fans persevered and got their shiny new objects.

And those fans who hack are ready for this weekend’s iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco. This year’s organizers — Raven, Dom, Chris, Blake — have done a phenomenal job pulling in sponsors and handling logistics, volunteers, speakers and developers.

Developers, testers and hackers will gather at Adobe’s offices tomorrow to start designing and building code for the iPhone and iTouch through the weekend. They’ll use the iPhone’s SDK as well as web technologies to build cool iPhone friendly apps. A hackathon contest will be held on Saturday and Sunday (August 2-3) to promote open source community values of sharing, contributing and openness while churning out some serious code. At the end of the contest on Sunday, each app will be demonstrated and qualified participants will win cool prizes. I can tell you from experience, the prizes are really neat (developers even won iPhones last year).

To top it off, the excitement doesn’t stop in San Francisco. With satellite events happening concurrently in Austin, Chicago, Colorado, Portland and Seattle and internationally in London, Paris and India (Yeh!) , this weekend will buzz with activity.

Can’t wait to see the fun begin tomorrow evening! See you there.

Open Source Open World at OSCON’08

OSCONNext week is OSCON. As this conference celebrates its 10th anniversary, there are a lot of cool happenings at and around the conference. I’ve been partipating at OSCON now for over 5 years and it has always been the hub of foss geeks from all parts of the US and beyond. It has changed its character a bit but not much. The hallway conversations, great talks, BOFs, awards, parties and the sheer number of geeks, geek-herders and wanna-be geeks (from companies who can’t avoid open source anymore) make the OSCON experience pretty exciting. This year promises to be fun again with co-located events such as OSCamp, an unconference from the 23rd to 25th occuring simultaneously at OSCON.

I’ll be part of a panel discussion termed “Open Source, Open World” and will be presenting a perspective on open source in India and its impact on India’s IT ecosystem. My fellow speakers will be Nnenna Nwakanme of FOSSFA Africa, Li Gong of Mozilla China, Bruno Souza of JUG, Brazil, Harshad Gune of GNUnify, India, Martin Michlmayr of HP, Europe and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT, Europe. The world will speak through these panelists and it should be very interesting to learn what open source has done to transform the world in the past 10 years. Danese Cooper will be moderator.

It has also been 10 years since the term “open source” was coined and the OSI was formed. The open source community will be gathering at OSCON to celebrate these anniversaries. I look forward to the next 10 years of open source going strong and changing the landscape of software development in many more ways.

See you there!