LINUX ASIA 2007 OPENS TO ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE

The 3 day Open Source extravaganza, LinuxAsia 2007 began in the capital today amidst many surprises, including a prominent participation by Microsoft, which has traditionally been considered the bete-noire of the open source movement, showcasing interoperability between MS' proprietary platforms and OSS. This year, LinuxAsia, the largest conference and exhibition of open-source companies and professionals is being organized by the Forum for Open Source Initiatives in India (FOSII). FOSII also announced that from the next year, it planned to hold a nation-wide Open Source Week, which would include events in Bangalore and Mumbai, culminating in the LinuxAsia conference in Delhi.

This year the 3-day LinuxAsia conference is addressing itself to highlighting the challenges facing a developing economy like India, and aims to identify 20 critical areas which would then be opened up to the Open Source community to find solutions. Awards totaling Rs 5 lakh would be given to the persons suggesting the most innovative solution, using open source.

Setting the agenda, Sandeep Menon, convener of FOSII and Director of Linux business for Novell West Asia said that Open Source must address itself to bringing down to affordable levels the entry cost into the knowledge society. “The transformation of the Indian economy in the last 10 years can be directly attributed to the social empowerment brought about by TV and telephony in rural India. Information is a powerful agent of change, and to bridge the digital divide, we must address ourselves to providing information access to the masses”, he said.

Venkatesh Hariharan, Member of FOSSI and Head of Open Source Affairs at RedHat, said that it is anticipated that the pace of change in Open Source, which has already been quite substantial, would radically step up in the near future. Venkat urged that India, which has been traditionally an open knowledge society, should take a macro view when discussing with developed economies the claims on IPR and need for protection and compensation for proprietary knowledge. Elaborating he said, “Yoga and Ayurveda, which are perhaps the largest knowledge pools have traditionally been open-source and yet it is a US $ 30 billion industry in the US alone. Open source is not opposed to commercial gains, it is opposed to ownership and limiting of knowledge and resources”.

Delivering the keynote address “The Next 100 Years”, Klaus Knopper, the legendary founder of Knoppix made five thought provoking predictions on the fate of the human society, if the bias towards proprietary systems continued. First, he said, in 10 years no one would be able to store any file and to view even our own content, we would need to pay some service provider on pay-per-view basis. Second he said that in 20 years time, no company would invest in developing software. His third prediction was that in 30 years time the universal computer as we know if today (on which you can perform a different functions) would have died, and only very simplistic specialized devices would be available. Fifty years from now, people would no longer know how to use a computer!

Other prominent speakers included Dr. Gulshan Rai, Senior Director, E-commerce and Cyber Laws, DoIT, Ministry of IT. Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, well known visionary and founder of MIT Media Lab, participated via video-conferencing. M T Raghunathan, of Google mentioned that the biggest challenge before the entire IT community was how to make Internet Access Ubiquitous. In India, only 7 percent of the urban population and less than 1 percent of rural population today have access to the world of Internet. This must increase to at least 75 percent, if India is to be a true knowledge society.

According to a survey conducted by Linux For You magazine on trends and growth in Open Source in India, nearly 55% of the players experienced 50%-plus growth and these included many of the heavyweights of the OSS/Linux industry. The top-five verticals that drove the business demand were government, Banking and Financial Services, Manufacturing, Education, and the IT industry itself.

The survey further concluded that the current year promises to be even bigger. While the industry experienced a growth of about 60% last year and the major players are targeting a growth of over 75% in their OSS related business. According to Menon, the confidence of the industry was highlighted by the fact that when asked if they would like the government to favour Open Source in their own projects, as is done in many nations, most of those surveyed responded with - let the best man win.

Elaborating on the details of the survey findings, Rahul Chopra, Editor of Linux for You, which conducted the study, said that there were three major areas of concern that could pose a challenge to the growth of OSS in the country. These three challenges were (i) lack of resources to tap the markets – throwing open a major opportunity for venture funds looking for their next growth area, (ii) lack of trained and skilled manpower – indicating an unaddressed demand that educational institutions could exploit, and (iii) unsure customers who while convinced about the benefits were not quite sure how to leverage OSS for their organizations.

Regards,
Kumar Thirumal.