By IANS
New Delhi : India’s free and open source software (FOSS) thrust is growing bigger. Its annual event, freed.in, has just concluded. And it drew some prominent speakers and serious support from industry.
This year’s “community event promoting freedom in technology, software and related fields and personal privacy” was held over the past week at the School of Information Technology (SIT) at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
India Linux User’s Group hosted freed.in in collaboration with SIT. It drew sponsorship from industry heavyweights Intel, Google, Sun Microsystems and others, giving a hint of the growing role that technology built by hobbyists is now playing in the global IT sector.
Freed.in – earlier called freedel.in – is the second-largest event of its kind, after the FOSS.in event held in Bangalore every December since 2001. The Bangalore event was earlier called Linux Bangalore.
This year’s freed.in saw the participation of global names such as Robin “Roblimo” Miller, editor-in-chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owns prominent cyber ventures like the science, science fiction and technology-related website Slashdot, the open source software developers foundry SourceForge.net, software releases website freshmeat.net, the FOSS-based news site linux.com, the IT news and collaboration community NewsForge, and electronic commerce company ThinkGeek.
It also saw the participation of Soon-Son “Shawn” Kwon from South Korea who worked with a “big corporation” by day and managed the highly successful Korean Linux Documentation Project by night “as a hobby”.
Other participants included Indian FOSS campaigners like Philip Tellis (Yahoo!) and Devdas Bhagat (Directi and Linux-India).
Intel’s Asia strategy manager for Linux and Open Source, Valsa Williams, whose global giant semiconductor company was principal sponsor for the event, said Intel would make “robust and flexible” GNU, Linux and open source solutions available to its customers.
She said freed.in was an “important platform that showcases what FOSS can do for businesses and academia”.
Andrew Lynn, associate professor of the SIT, commented: “Much of FOSS has roots in academia, and many of the analytical tools required are produced by the academic community. We now have solutions that rival state-of-the-art commercial software. All these can be modified and maintained by the local community. It gives students who are knowledgeable about FOSS a huge artillery of skills.”
In mid-September 2006, the same event was held to focus on servers and
administration, desktop applications, education, multilingual computing and localisation, applications and multimedia and graphics.
This annual event says it attempts to make free and open source software “more visible to the world, and share its excitement with everybody”.