Open-Source Convention Concludes in Delhi

Amidst healthy and vigorous debate, the three day LinuxAsia 2007 convention concluded today, with speakers from different segments and stakeholders of the open source community including industry, government and the developer community highlighting the 20 key challenges that threshold economies like India face. Commercial or business interests of vendors are not necessarily contrary to the concept of societal benefit as espoused by the OSS proponents. This formed the theme of the overall deliberations at the various sessions at the convention.

The analysis was summed up in a presentation from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the knowledge partners to the event. Cdr. Deepak Uppal (retd), principal consultant at PWC said, Overall, we have identified 20 challenge areas for ICT using Open Source technologies. But what is more important is to challenge the OSS community to produce solutions that can help bridge the gaps in physical infrastructure. He said that those regions that have not managed to better their physical infrastructure, such as Ladakh or the North-East, could they be brought on par with the highly urbanized regions suing solutions ICT solutions. In other words, he said can we see OSS solutions making geography history

The twenty challenges identified were in areas related to of echnology, standards and regulation, finance management, infrastructure and usage. Among the challenges were interoperability of devices and networks, building devices that are robust and designed for rural conditions, managing change and obsolescence of technologies, security issues, aligning government regulations with new technologies, standards for multilingual storage of content, lack of realistic financial models for project management, low penetration geographically, low penetration demographically, power supply, cost of ICT, high bandwidth and transmission costs, exclusion of segments of the population, lack of education and skills, and user acceptance and 'Cost for Use'.

Delivering the keynote for the day, popular Linux Guru Klaus Knopper took the OSS movement to a new level, that too with a touch of Gandhigiri. He said, If you are going to buy any hardware and it doesn't support open-source, tell the vendor so and return the product. That way, vendor companies would get the message, if enough people do that, and they would stop manufacturing what doesn't sell. Anthony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon University West, another key speaker at LinuxAsia 2007, presented experiences of best practices from around the world and said Most organizations have developed their IT policies and practices to reflect the use of commercial, closed source software packages. These policies must be updated to allow organizations to take advantage of both commercial and community-based open source software.

Giving a roundup on the convention at its conclusion, Sandeep Menon, convener of the Forum for Open Source Innovation in India (FOSII), the body that was the guiding light behind LinuxAsia 2007, said, The LinuxAsia initiative has been gaining strength from year to year. This year, LinuxAsia 2007 brings into focus the ground that Linux has gained among all segments. We had speakers and delegates from the US, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, UK, Germany, Sweden, China, and many other places. Such illustrious leaders as open source luminary and co-founder of Apache - Brian Behlendorf, Dr. Louis Suarez-potts of OpenOffice.org, and Klaus Knopper, creator of the live distribution Knoppix. The gathering included persons from government, industry and academia. There were students, industry leaders, and civil servants all brought together by a shared passion for the advancement of India. The gathering was truly representative of the nature that the open source community has become around the world.

Rahul Chopra, editor of LINUX for You magazine, a founder member of FOSII, and organiser of the LinuxAsia event, reported that over 100 top-level CXOs attended the CXOSummit, a special track of the LinuxAsia convention this year, which makes it the premier open source conference in this part of the world. LinuxAsia is one of the biggest Linux/OSS events in Asia, and its 2007 edition marks the fourth anniversary of the event. With the newly formed FOSII providing the overall direction to the event, LinuxAsia 2007 seeded the idea of utilization of Open Source for betterment of common citizens as embodied in the 20 top ICT challenges that the conference threw up, he said.

The 20 critical challenges thrown up by this years meet would be opened for innovative solutions from the worldwide open source community. At next years LinuxAsia, awards totaling Rs 5 lakh would be given to persons coming up with the most innovative solutions. This kind of challenge is expected to provide the much-needed impetus to the Indian open source community to reach to a level where it can start contributing actively and forge ahead with its avowed agenda of fostering development of actual pro-poor applications, rather than just being an academic exercise.

Regards,
Kumar Thirumal.