Open-Source has Potential to Create Software Giants out of Individuals

Speakers from different segments and stakeholders of the Open-Source community including industry, government and the developer community highlighted that commercial or business interests of vendors were not necessarily contrary to the concept of societal benefit as espoused by the OSS proponents. This formed the theme at various discussions and presentations held at the CXO Summit, a special track on the second day of the ongoing LinuxAsia 2007 convention in New Delhi today.

Among the star speakers was Brian Behlendorf, Open Source luminary, co-Founder of Apache and CTO of Collabnet. Delivering his keynote that set the tone of discussions for the day, Behlendorf noted that the beauty of Open Source was the potential for an individual developer in a country like India to become the next big thing and create a software giant to rival the best in the world. Examples of Wikipedia and Google were brought up. The subject went down well with the participants, as the main conference continued to discuss how the large pool of software professionals in India could be leveraged to improve OSS solutions and deployment in the critical areas which affect common life of citizens.

On the subject of India and innovation, Dr Deepak Phatak, Chair Professor at IIT Bombay, stressed the need for proprietary vendors to work positively with the OSS technology leaders to create technology that would ultimately benefit not just industry but also bring the opportunities down to the last tribal boy

The CXO Summit also saw a lively panel discussion chaired by Dr. louis Suarez-Potts of OpenOffice.org, at which a wide spectrum of vendors discussed productisation of OSS solutions so that these could be commercially brought to the marketplace bundled with service and support. Users and customers who have already experienced OSS products sought to shed light on the complex TCO calculation the OSS software often seems.

At the main conference, the legendary Klaus Knopper, dveloper of Knoppix presented case studies to demonstrate how Open Source was enabling accessibility of computers to the physically handicapped. He gave the example of his wife who shops on Ebay, though she is vision-impaired. Other presenters at the Conference included speakers from Microsoft which marked its very first presence at an OSS convention with inter-operability, Ingres Corporation, the Linux Group of Novell, Google India, Yahoo, C-DAC and Wipro.

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/ Forum for Open Source Innovation in India/ (FOSII), providing the overall direction to the event, LinuxAsia 2007 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 to the overall software pool of the world and forge ahead with its avowed agenda of fostering development of actual pro-poor applications, rather than just being an academic exercise. The theme for LinuxAsia this year is /innovations in the field of open source to help develop pro-poor technologies and thus bridge the digital divide

Regards,
Kumar Thirumal.