NEW DELHI: Asia’s premier open source conference and expo Linux Asia 2007, took off at Delhi. In his inaugural keynote, titled “The Next 100 Years”, Klaus Knopper, founder Knoppix shared his views on a paradigm where there would be no need for technologies like digital rights management (DRM) and the producer of content be it software programs, music, video etc. can directly sell it to its target audience. Elaborating his viewpoint, he gave the concept of ‘CopyLeft’ meaning some rights would be reserved and others free.

According to Klaus “The next 100 years will probably not be the last ones, after all if developers and users stay aware of tiny non-technical details, striving to keep their independence. In spite of all the things that have been said before.

M T Raghunath, SW engineer at Google India, in his session “ICT Challenges of India” stressed on the need for hooking on rural India to the Internet platform. Citing reasons for this need he said, “Rural India contributes to 60 percent of India’s GDP and hence there is a very strong reasons that they should be able to leverage the Internet medium and use it to their advantage. Increase in Internet penetration will lead to creation of more innovative services and applications.”

According to Raghunath, there will be an explosion in numbers if network creation and value demonstration can be achieved at an appropriate price point. There is a need for access devices, which just work eliminating the need to administer. He urged the gathering of software developers to think differently and come up with innovative solutions to make this happen. “India has a unique set of challenges, which are different from the developed world, we need some right solutions to see an inflection point.”

In his session on “Enabling OSS Innovation In India” Prof. C N Krishna, of The National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) talked about initiatives taken by them to spread know how on open source technologies amongst colleges and universities. Research, training, networking, entrepreneurship development are some activities undertaken by NRCFOSS for promotion of FOSS. NRCFOSS has tied up with over 50 engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu, for providing education on FOSS; they now plan to move to other parts of the country. 

Dr Gulshan Rai, Senior Director, E-commerce and Cyber Laws, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of IT, expressed his views on the constant debate between open source and proprietary software. “There is no clarity amongst people and according to me this debate is useless. Both the technologies have their pros and cons, a user needs to understand his need and decide upon whichever suits him best.” Pointing on the lack of support in the open source paradigm, Dr Rai said, “Organizations should work towards proving the end user with a hassle-free work environment. Value for money and service matters at the end and vendors have to enable that. This is an area where promoters of open source technologies have to come up.” 

In a session on adoption of OSS in Asia, delegates from neighboring countries Iran, Pakistan and Sri Lanka shared the work done in promoting adoption of open source software in their respective countries. In his presentation on ‘Humanitarian FOSS in Asia’, Chamindra de Silva, of Lanka Software Foundation cited the example of The Sahana Project, an open source collaboration tool built to help fellow countrymen during a natural disaster like tsunami or earthquake. Sahana is a GIS enabled, web-based portal, with applications that can be used to manage information during a disaster.