GNUnify, the annual technical festival of Free and Open Source software (FOSS) in Pune, was held on February 28th and 29th. It was an event worth highlighting because it demonstrated immense enthusiasm for learning, teaching and sharing about FOSS. The Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) organized GNUnify and managed it close to perfection. They had great help and support from their faculty, student community and the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG). The event was “free” to attend and had packed sessions with more than 500 attendees.

GNUnify 2004

Prominent speakers included faces from industry and academia - Dr SK Gupta (STPI-Maharashtra), BC Sekar (HCL), Tarun Upadhyay (Induslogic), Alolita Sharma (Technetra), En Chiang Lee (HP India), Dr Thangaraju (Wipro), Rajkumar (Linuxense), Robert Adkins (Technetra), Niyam Bhushan (Digital Dionysus), Mahendra (Infosys), Namita Iyer and Saifi Khan (Recombinant), Arjun Jain (RV College of Engineering), Chandrasekhar Joshi (Disha), Bimal Kumar Jain (XLRI), Sagar Behere (Mahindra & Mahindra), Gaurav Pant (PLUG), Tarun Dua (PervasiveOne), Amit Bakore (Veritas), Kaustav Ghoshal (IBM India), Randhir Dugal (CalSoft), Trevor Warren, and Abhijit Bhattacharyya (IUCAA).

The first day focused on Open Source software technologies with Techie-Talks. The event also ran a GNU/Linux install fest, tutorials and workshops to highlight the latest technologies. Topics covered Ethereal, QMail, wireless technologies, firewall architectures, IPTables, embedded systems, clustering, real-time Linux, grid computing, network monitoring with Tethereal, process scheduling in Linux, and more.

GNUnify install fest

The install fest was a treat to see – with labs of 30 systems being used to perform installations under the guidance of experts from PLUG. Installers were walked through Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian installs. In parallel sessions, tutorials on PHP, MySQL and Java were half day sessions which drew in a large, interactive community eager to learn. The workshops addressed hot topics from hardware interfacing in GNU/Linux to using FOSS on the Desktop.

Day 2 highlighted the business side of FOSS with case studies illustrating how the 400 strong engineering group of Infosys has successfully migrated to Open Source and how XLRI migrated to GNU/Linux and supports 250 students and faculty. Other speakers covered collaborative project revenue models in Open Source, licensing variations for Open Source projects and products, Open Source software in education, and interesting implementations and issues in applying FOSS to astronomy research at Pune University.

GNUnify brought together an excellent program for the vibrant and cosmopolitan student community in Pune with government and industry participation from Silicon Valley, Nasik, Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune itself. GNUnify is already gearing up for next year: see you at GNUnify 2005.

GNUnify 2004 Conference

February 28-29, 2004
Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Pune, India

Talk: Collaborative Open Source Project Revenue Models

Alolita Sharma of Technetra discussed successful open source project revenue models in this talk. Two collaborative business examples – OpenOffice.org and MySQL were critically reviewed.

Talk: OSS Software Licensing

Robert Adkins of Technetra talked about various licensing models common in Open Source software such as the GPL, Mozilla Public License (MPL), dual licensing and multiple licensing schemes at the GNUnify conference in Pune, India.

Talk: An Introduction to Open Source Software

Delhi College of Engineering (DCE), Delhi, India

Robert Adkins talked about the various aspects of open source software including the OSS paradigm of collaboration, precedent and practice which has led to the success of many software projects.

When you change places with your slave, even for the tiniest moment, your life is forever changed. You cannot then fail to seek his or her freedom. Yet freedom is incontrovertible only to the slave. To the free person, a degenerate form of freedom is often just the freedom to exploit, while to the slave, freedom is just emancipation. The chaos of freedom can form its own prison. What’s missing in raw freedom is responsibility and guidance. Long term success demands more than freedom and the protection of freedom.

Both Microsoft Windows and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) equally strive to be free! The difference is only intent: FOSS wants freedom from lock-in or lock-out while proprietary private interests wants freedom to forge the lock: Both need the help of a larger vision.

Proprietary private interest software, such as Microsoft Windows, epitomizes the danger of raw freedom: irresponsible freedom is one-sided and selfish and embodies only the freedom to operate with as few constraints as possible in order to maximise revenue and profits. As an extreme example, Windows may need corrective constraint and guidance to become less predatory and to reduce its lock-in of users as well as developers. Ultimately, this guidance may derive from anti-monopoly legislation in the U.S., E.U., and interested countries, including India. In the end, Microsoft may learn the hard way to become a more responsible player who can be responsive to the needs of its customers for healthy competition in the software and IT services industry.

For related reasons, unconstrained freedom cannot be the ultimate goal of FOSS. Without purpose and guidance free software often degenerates into sloppy, mediocre, or half-built products caught in the inevitable myopia of small or specialized projects. Raw freedom cannot guarantee quality or relevance. The best free software is constrained by a vision of purpose and requires the good fortune to be guided by the broad perspective of talented leadership. Linus Torvalds is the quintessential “benign dictator” of Linux.

The ideal of “freedom” in Free and Open Source Software must be to share the energies and extend the protections of all contributors and developers in mutual benefit. However, the ideal of collaborative self-development and mutual self-help cannot by itself ensure highest quality and relevance, since the developer community is but a fraction of the larger consumer community. In the baby steps beyond initial freedom, FOSS needs feedback, guidance and proactive assistance from all of its well-wishers and beneficiaries to maintain lasting quality and relevance. The beneficiaries which form the ultimate customer base of FOSS are more motivated by the indirect and derivative benefits of freedom. For example, small offices using Open Office only care about functionality and cost. Large government or industry consumers, in addition, want to use Open Source to drive down costs through competition with private proprietary monopolists. Despite their disinterest in the code base, these consumers are the only way to sustain FOSS as an industry paradigm. For the FOSS nuclear engine to sustain its power it must add the fuel of acceptance and use. Wide acceptance drives up the quality and breadth of features of all Free and Open Source Software.

But acceptance of FOSS depends only in part on FOSS itself. The indirect benefits of FOSS must be used to facilitate the investment by government and industry into the technological base and to encourage third party vendors to evolve deployment and support structures.

FOSS needs the support and investment of both governments and private adopters. Governments must accelerate their support of FOSS to guarantee their own independence, authority and capacity to engineer information based societies. Private interests must also support FOSS to promote a business services model which generates jobs and wealth in the very communities they serve.

LinuxAsia 2004 Conference

February 9-11, 2004
India Habitat Center, New Delhi, India

Talk: Make Money, Save Money - Entrepreneurship and Open Source

Alolita Sharma of Technetra talked about how open source software and the OSS paradigm encourages entrepreneurship. The OSS paradigm has spun off a new generation of many successful open source projects such as Apache, Linux, MySQL and many service companies supporting these projects commercially. Indian entrepreneurs can also use the pillars of collaboration, precedent and practice to create successful businesses around OSS.

Talk: Open Source Licensing Made Easy

Robert Adkins of Technetra talked about various licensing models common in Open Source software at India’s first open source software conference focussed on open source in business, government and academia.

Panel: Show Me the Money

Moderated by Robert Adkins, this panel titled “Show Me the Money” discussed how money can be made with OSS, do’s and don’ts and how big companies such as IBM, SUN and Intel are riding this wave of success and how local companies are doing thriving business using open source software – riding on the “shoulders of giants”.

The IT industry in the US is reviving. No one could sense this more than the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Devastated by the downward spiral that devalued the stock market, wracked by the scandals of WorldCom and Enron, the glimmer of recovery seems like a floodlamp of new beginnings. In the damp tunnel darkened by recession, IT companies were forced to retool their strategies for development, production, and deployment. The task at hand in the software industry has been to improve quality and maintain demand, yet produce on much tighter margins.

Enter Open Source software. Just as Europe has had to reinvent itself into an economy based on cooperation and collaboration, Open Source software offers a global collaborative model of development, testing and maintenance with some of the best engineers in the world sharing the burden, from Silicon Valley to Silicon India. Costs are usually absorbed in a passion of voluntarism or more significantly by the efforts of individuals and groups employed in direct or related industries. Success is measured not in financial quarters but over a much longer time period as the larger projects evolve and spin off practical technologies and benefits.

And therein lies the next wave of innovation and the stirrings of new IPOs raising confidence in the stock markets to invest in this new wave and turn it into a tsunami.

Google, with its great Linux server farm, will go IPO in February. Sun is retooling its reseller channels to embrace its Java Desktop System (JDS) and Star Office. The wave of embedded Linux toolchains is transforming the next generation of consumer appliances and electronic devices. Red Hat just raised $600 million through a bond offering, bringing its cash reserves to $1 billion. The money will be used for acquisitions and international expansion.

The largest segment of new wealth creation, however, is Open Source Software integration and services. Key in the near term is the migration of legacy infrastructure and systems to Linux and Open Source. Important examples include Amazon, Verisign, Merril Lynch and the Dresdner Bank. Verisign, adding generously to Red Hat’s bottom line, is converting 2000 servers that power the Internet domain name system to enterprise Linux.

The tsunami of large-scale migrations to Linux and Open Source has already reached the shores of India. Like the Y2K bonanza, this same wave is being felt in all the outsourcing hot spots in India, from Chennai to Bangalore, Hyderabad to Mumbai, Noida to Gurgaon. What is surprising, however, is that the migration encompasses not just the conversion of old Unix into Linux, there is a gathering chorus of requests from all the Fortune 100 companies for migrations from the proprietary MS Windows to Open Source.

Today, India is poised to ride the tsunami of this new, yet familiar, economic paradigm. Open Source Software can empower India to create knowledge, prosperity and enterprise. Practical Open Source tools can form a foundation from which to produce integrated solutions. It is the integration requirements inherent in the Open Source services model that plays to India’s classic strengths since the need for integrated solutions fuels the services backbone of traditional Indian outsourcing. Outsourcing is usually structured to prevent the acquisition of intellectual property by those performing the work. This down-side of traditional outsourcing is defeated by joint contribution and ownership on collaborative projects. So not only will Open Source projects lead to immediate income but, more importantly, will promote the long term ownership of sustainable intellectual property and development of core expertise. An economy based on the collaborative model of Open Source can transform traditional outsourcing services to the next level-global sustainable services. The true way to surf the tsunami of the new economy.