Open source technology rules at GNUnify 2004

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.