Open source: India needs to pool in more

Open source: India needs to pool in more

Leading opensourcers discuss the evolution of OSS at GNUnify 2008

Monday, February 11, 2008

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CMN Bureau

PUNE, INDIA: Free software is getting better and open source has seen deeper adoption among users.

These are some trends that churned out from experts at GNUnify 2008, a leading open source conclave, organized by SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Science and Research) and PLUG (Pune Linux User Group).

Free software has better bug reports, a public bug database, allows lot of testing for all the code, and much better user-cum-developer feedback, free development, independence and ultimate documentation as co-founder of MySQL, David Axmark, reflected at one of the sessions.

"Here, security is not by obscurity and moreover there's a lot of ecosystem code resulting in a lower total cost of ownership. In proprietary software, feedback is limited to white paper reviews," he emphasized.

Commenting on the progress of Indian developer fraternity, however, he remarked that there's a lot more room for open source contribution from India.

"Don't be focused on making more money. Just make enough money, ignore the trends and do what you feel apt and right," he said, adding that developers in India need to be more risk-takers.

Another speaker at the event, Alolita Sharma from Technetra applauded the wider base of open source that has been witnessed recently amongst the users, especially in India.

"With the growth of Web, social networking, users across the spectrum and specially education institutions and SMBs are showing this successful transition phase of open source."

GNUnify is a technical fest initiated in 2003 that hosts a conclave of experts and enthusiasts of the open source genre.

The event is similar to FOSS congregations, but managed and organized by students from SICSR, attracting geeks and students alike with technical talks on various languages and open source subjects, fests for Fedora and Mandriva, programming contests and workshops this weekend.

Speakers like Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins (founders-Technetra), Brian Blehndorf (co-founder Collabnet), Chander Kant (CEO of Zmanda), Daneese Cooper from OSI and David Axmark of My SQL covered topics like Ruby on Rails, open source business models, Mozilla Prism, portable code in Linux, open source audio-video streaming, Jquery, Debian, Python, Shell scripting, Linux and Bluetooth, SQLite, and successful open communities.

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