Dear all,
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public"
From what I gather, the PC magazines of the mid-90s were critical in getting FOSS (via Linux) in India and there were a few mailing lists that cropped up in the late 90s (the earliest archives I found are from 98. This list itself was formed in 2001). I guess there were some fights about naming (who owns ILUG v/s Bharat LUG etc) and the mailing lists were mostly about sharing tips regarding installation, drivers and networking troubleshooting.
In Chennai CDAC was established in 1998 and they started promoting FOSS in local universities and then branched off into NRCFOSS and launched the Bharat Operating System (BOSS) in 2007 (anyone using it??) that had built in localisation for Indian Languages. These days NRCFOSS is supposed to be working on a “SAAS based delivery stack for cloud computing” but can’t find any evidence of it. (Your tax payer money!!)
In Bangalore, the community was driven by the very inspirational Atul Chitnis and Kenneth Gonsalves who got some “movement” going on with the FOSS.IN events (from 2001 to 2004) which I have heard (second hand) that were instrumental in introducing FOSS to a large number of people. I also heard they had an ugly spat. Bangalore is also home to VTiger CRM, a popular Open Source project (or is it Chennai? I heard it was run by the Zoho group, can anyone confirm?)
State of Kerala (where A is for Activism) has been on the forefront of FOSS implementation (atleast in the PR) and the state legislature has also moved to get FOSS implemented in government. As per Wikipedia FSF India was established in Kerala in 2001 and the movement is largely led by Satish Babu who is the director of ICFOSS. They seem to be the most progressive in terms of FOSS implementation and there are a lot of News Items on how they have successfully used FOSS in many Gov activities (power to them!). (Interestingly the ICFOSS website has a “Director” menu link instead of “About Us” as if the Director and the organization are the same thing!). Kerala is also the home to the formerly open source Fedena school ERP project, which is un updated in a while and and I think its not open anymore.
In Mumbai we have Nagarjuna from Homi Bhabha who runs the Gnowledge Lab from 2007 (still can’t figure how its different from a wiki!) and has also been active in promoting One Laptop Per Child and other FOSS projects in India. Also in Mumbai is the very inspirational Krishnakant Mane who runs the GNU Khata project in IIT Mumbai (funded by ICFOSS?). Did not find any post on the history of GNU Khata but the mailing list is since 2009, so I assume it has been around since 2006-7? Ironically Mumbai is the only city that has some “projects” (in Mumbai, we do, we don’t talk) including our ERPNext (sorry for the plug) which was started in 2006 but the repo is from around 2008.
Speaking of Projects, the NRCFOSS website has a number of projects listed, but like spent tax payer money it seems to be hard to find any public repository or mailing list for any of them.
Also sometime, I am guessing since Facebook and mobile explosion (2007), the focus has moved from Linux to a more broader (and some might say evil) “Open Source” - note the renaming of popular blogs and events (Linux Asia is now Open Source India, Linuxforu is now Opensourceforu) and focus has now “shifted” to cloud based technologies like “OpenShift” and also there has been some movement in the Android space (Aakash tablet, again anyone seen the repos?). Also the “free thinking” community has also moved to other technologies like Python which have a reasonable community and some traction in the universities (SciPy).
I am not covering the commercial space yet. The Open Source India (OSI Days) event is happening this weekend in Bangalore and I am not sure if they even bother to post on these lists. Wipro has pledged to staff its Open Source Unit to 10,000 (yay!). And not to mention the hundreds or may be thousands of Open Source development shops that have sprung up all over India (esp in Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad) servicing Open Source projects on Elance and similar and mostly doing HTML / CSS / PHP based customization. The poor guys who don’t get respect for their taste but still manage serve many small businesses and keep the world moving.
In terms of contributors, I see some really brilliant individual contributors to various projects, many of whom have now moved to the west but their names still crop up in mailing list archives. There is a FOSS Community of India page on the wikia site that has a “hall of fame” section which is sadly unmaintained but has a list of many individual contributors (and probably some of them are spammed or self-promoted)
I guess this mail itself has become the article - I am sure I have missed a whole bunch of important stuff so please send your comments and thoughts. (specially the old timers!)
Thanks!
best, Rushabh
@rushabh_mehta https://erpnext.com
You may want to cover a couple of initiatives from IIT Bombay:
* http://fossee.in/ * http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/grc/
The second one involves the high end compiler technology and hence not many people know about it. It was a part of NRCFOSS-II but the government support has stopped after the initial enthusiasm and so we have been restricted to the R part and have had to abandon the D part of it. We have a bunch of Ph.D. scholars trying to solve some hard problems and hopefully some day their results will find way into GCC or some other compiler infrastructure.
Hope this helps.
Uday Khedker.
signature.html Dr. Uday Khedker Professor Department of Computer Science & Engg. IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India.
Email : uday@cse.iitb.ac.in Homepage: http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday Phone : Office - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 7717, 91 (22) 2576 7717 (Direct) Res. - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 8717, 91 (22) 2576 8717 (Direct)
On Saturday 08 November 2014 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta wrote:
I guess this mail itself has become the article - I am sure I have missed a whole bunch of important stuff so please send your comments and thoughts. (specially the old timers!)
Thanks!
best, Rushabh
@rushabh_mehta https://erpnext.com
On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public"
From what I gather, the PC magazines of the mid-90s were critical in getting FOSS (via Linux) in India and there were a few mailing lists that cropped up in the late 90s (the earliest archives I found are from 98. This list itself was formed in 2001). I guess there were some fights about naming (who owns ILUG v/s Bharat LUG etc) and the mailing lists were mostly about sharing tips regarding installation, drivers and networking troubleshooting.
There were plenty of workshops, especially at engineering institutes. That is where the real promotion happened.
There were interventions against software patents, which resulted in the introduction of an additional line in the law that stopped software patents per se. This block was sought to be bypassed by massaged interpretations of the law by the Indian Patent Office via a patents manual meant to aid indian innovators.Huge number of protests, including meetings at various cities, with the Director of the Indian patent office, finally managed to stave off such dangers.
There were interventions against mangling of standards by M$ who used despicable mudslinging tactics to get their filthy slime passed off as standards. The IIT Bom took on the challenge of documenting the innumerable contradictions and missing parts. In return the M$ India head clown labelled Prof. Phatak as biased.
Hi,
--- On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote: | Kenneth Gonsalves who got some “movement” going on with the FOSS.IN events (from 2001 to | 2004) --
While I can't speak for Kenneth Gonsalves, he was really not interested in FOSS.in.
https://www.mail-archive.com/talk-in@openstreetmap.org/msg00671.html
https://www.mail-archive.com/talk-in@openstreetmap.org/msg00676.html
He was very active with the Indian Python community, did lot of work to create the IPSS, and to support its activities.
https://wiki.python.org/moin/IPSS
SK
While I can't speak for Kenneth Gonsalves, he was really not interested in FOSS.in.
Thanks Shakthi for the update. Checked that Kenneth was involved with NRC-FOSS. Was this the alternate group? (NRC-FOSS - FOSSEE Lab at IITB and ICFOSS, are all govt funded and seemed aligned and different from the FOSS.in group (?)).
While I was digging more last night, I ran into this (http://atulchitnis.net/2006/happy-10th-anniversary-pc-quest-linux/) - It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. Also, he was more an evangelist rather than an activist (or rather, he was firmly not an activist, which pissed off the Free Software guys I am assuming). Other than Chitnis, frequent visits by RMS (and remote mentoring?) has also helped us to get us to where we are.
I am wondering what is the legacy. What is the state of FOSS activism / evangelism in India today? have there been any more movements since the OOXML? I don’t see anyone taken over Chitnis as the chief evangelist for FOSS? Would love to get some views on this.
---
ps. An interesting footnote - I found no less than FOSS 4 accounting apps / attempts (AVSAP, by Kenneth Gonsalves, GNUKhata, Aakash Business Tools and VahiKhata by CDAC). Seems like the holy grail of Indian FOSS!
pps. And if you did not know, the CDAC Open Source initiative for Cloud Computing is called “Meghdoot” :) - Could not find any repos (maybe an RTI is required)
Rushabh,
--- On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote: | It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. --
Again, I can't speak for Atul Chitnis, but, I feel you need to come away from idol worship.
Yes, there isn't any one person who is responsible to popularize F/OSS in India.
--- | What is the state of FOSS activism / evangelism in India today? --
There are people and communities that cater for both local needs, and at the national level. Some call it fragmentation, but, cloning is natural in F/OSS communities, and it is important for scalability. There is no one single silver bullet though.
Regards,
SK
--- On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote: | It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. --
Again, I can't speak for Atul Chitnis, but, I feel you need to come away from idol worship.
Yes, there isn't any one person who is responsible to popularize F/OSS in India.
I think you missed the operating word “more” responsible. If distributing a million Linux CDs in tech-averse India is not a major achievement then I don’t know what is. I know people will say he and CyberMedia made money out of it but the end result was that he did reach a lot of people. The word that comes to mind, (sorry for the movie reference) is “Chutzpah” - "I distributed a million Linux CDs in India and even got paid for it."
I am not sure about idol worship - I am pretty much an outsider and have never met Chitnis or attended his events. I am forming opinions on what I have seen online.
The only other person who comes close (from what I gather publicly) is probably Satish Babu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu) - unfortunately he does not blog so I have no idea what drives him / his contributions and if he is really responsible for State of Kerala being such an active implementer of FOSS.
Would love to know if there are such people!
| What is the state of FOSS activism / evangelism in India today? --
There are people and communities that cater for both local needs, and at the national level. Some call it fragmentation, but, cloning is natural in F/OSS communities, and it is important for scalability. There is no one single silver bullet though.
I agree, but also believe that consolidation helps. It also depends upon the urgency one feels about the state of affairs and the crores of public money spent on software licenses. Activism / Evangelism should be multi-pronged and both local and global
Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
--- On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com
wrote:
| It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. --
Again, I can't speak for Atul Chitnis, but, I feel you need to come away from idol worship.
Yes, there isn't any one person who is responsible to popularize F/OSS
in India.
I think you missed the operating word “more” responsible. If distributing a million Linux CDs in tech-averse India is not a major achievement then I don’t know what is. I know people will say he and CyberMedia made money out of it but the end result was that he did reach a lot of people. The word that comes to mind, (sorry for the movie reference) is “Chutzpah” - "I distributed a million Linux CDs in India and even got paid for it."
I am not sure about idol worship - I am pretty much an outsider and have never met Chitnis or attended his events. I am forming opinions on what I have seen online.
The only other person who comes close (from what I gather publicly) is probably Satish Babu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu) - unfortunately he does not blog so I have no idea what drives him / his contributions and if he is really responsible for State of Kerala being such an active implementer of FOSS.
Would love to know if there are such people!
| What is the state of FOSS activism / evangelism in India today? --
There are people and communities that cater for both local needs, and at the national level. Some call it fragmentation, but, cloning is natural in F/OSS communities, and it is important for scalability. There is no one single silver bullet though.
I agree, but also believe that consolidation helps.
Consolidation has no meaning in the FOSS world. And that is it's strength. It makes it hard for moneybags to figure out the beast on one end and allows innumerable individuals and groups to use stuff for their specific needs. Thus, while M$ was staring at their desktop, and Nokia at their phone scree, the entire mobile market whizzed past those two. Additionally the embedded market has left M$ windows CE and other oses like neutrino and qnx in the de
It also depends upon the urgency one feels about the state of affairs and
the crores of public money spent on software licenses.
Nothing to do with software or evangelism. It is merely about the money.
Activism / Evangelism should be multi-pronged and both local and global
On 10 November 2014 09:35, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
Checked that Kenneth was involved with NRC-FOSS. Was this the alternate group? (NRC-FOSS - FOSSEE Lab at IITB and ICFOSS, are all govt funded and seemed aligned and different from the FOSS.in group (?)).
http://www.nrcfoss.org.in/ Kenneth was based out of the AU-KBC research centre at the Madras Institute of Technology campus.
While I was digging more last night, I ran into this ( http://atulchitnis.net/2006/happy-10th-anniversary-pc-quest-linux/) - It seems no one person is more responsible to popularize FOSS in India other than Chitnis. Also, he was more an evangelist rather than an activist (or rather, he was firmly not an activist, which pissed off the Free Software guys I am assuming). Other than Chitnis, frequent visits by RMS (and remote mentoring?) has also helped us to get us to where we are.
I think this is over-generalising things. Each one has their own opinion and approach and are free to do so. More than "remote mentoring" I think it was the initiative taken by many locally that actually helped take FOSS forward - it might have been individually or organisationally.
The first and only state to move completely at Free Software was Kerala and this was primarily due to the direct action by the Left-backed Kerala School Teachers Association http://kstakerala.in/ and supported by local FS activists.
The first and only state to move completely at Free Software was Kerala and this was primarily due to the direct action by the Left-backed Kerala School Teachers Association http://kstakerala.in/ and supported by local FS activists. --
Thanks Vikram for the update. Any more direct links on this? I am not finding much data on this. ICFOSS seems to claim the credits.
The first and only state to move completely at Free Software was Kerala
and
this was primarily due to the direct action by the Left-backed Kerala School Teachers Association http://kstakerala.in/ and supported by
local FS
activists.
Thanks Vikram for the update. Any more direct links on this? I am not finding much data on this. ICFOSS seems to claim the credits.
I am not sure how you missed "ICFOSS has been registered as a Society. The first Director of ICFOSS took charge from 1 March 2011." from http://icfoss.in/
The IT@School project by the Kerala govt was active much before 2001 and while initially suggesting proprietary software later moved to Free Software with KSTA's direct intervention
Papers discussing different aspects of the IT@school project are http://www.itforchange.net/sites/default/files/ITfC/PPP%20vs%20integrated%20... and http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/cgi-bin/espace.pdf?file=/2013/03/15/file...
I think the metrics to measure who made the biggest impact on FOSS in India would vary a lot as the contributions have been different. For example, KSTA has been active in promoting Free Software for quite a while and has directly impacted Government policy and adoption of FS in all aspects of education in Kerala. http://www.thehindu.com/2005/02/01/stories/2005020110210300.htm
I am sure that somebody must have done a study on the impact of FOSS.in
The IT@School project by the Kerala govt was active much before 2001 and while initially suggesting proprietary software later moved to Free Software with KSTA's direct intervention
Thanks again for the links…So are there 2 groups in Kerala or is it all under one banner?
Here is another important link:
http://kstakerala.in/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/06/G.O.109.pdf
The trigger apparently was M$ stopping support for WinXP - and State of Kerala did not want to pay upgrade fees.. Which totally makes sense.
The IT@School project by the Kerala govt was active much before 2001 and
while initially suggesting proprietary software later moved to Free Software with KSTA's direct intervention
Thanks again for the links…So are there 2 groups in Kerala or is it all under one banner?
As the name suggests, one is a project by the Govt and the other is an association for teachers
On 8 November 2014 23:52, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India.
Then you need to look at http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-india/ starts 2000 http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsug-bangalore/ starts 2004
and the respective forks based on method of organisation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Movement_of_India starts 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Movement_of_Karnataka starts 2009 https://github.com/fsmk/SC14-Handbook/blob/master/introduction_to_free_softw...
On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public"
A while back there was this thread on the list - http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20131230/074216.html
A while back there was this thread on the list - http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20131230/074216.html
Thanks Sankarshan, did go through Indivar’s thesis. He does briefly writes about the dichotomy between Free and Open and that seems to be the center point of most such discussions, but there is not much stuff beyond that.
On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Rushabh Mehta rmehta@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public"
<snip what you already gathered> you could add, FOSS movements on enabling Indian language support in FOSS. An incomplete timeline - http://indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/IndLinuxSaga (focus more on activities under Indlinux group), , lot more has happened since 2007 that still needs to be documented.
Then what should not be missed is the grooming of LUGs and other groups, the activities they brought in, events they organized. Every event helped spawn more activities, people. Some venues were the hotbeds for many activities be it places like IIT* , JNU, Sarai, SICSR or the favourite meeting and eating joints of Luggers.
An article may not do full justice, what is needed is a book on FOSS in India, may collaboratively written as wikibook, if all agree to disagree and keep a lid on the flames!!
Karunakar
<snip what you already gathered> you could add, FOSS movements on enabling Indian language support in FOSS. An incomplete timeline - http://indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/IndLinuxSaga (focus more on activities under Indlinux group), , lot more has happened since 2007 that still needs to be documented.
Then what should not be missed is the grooming of LUGs and other groups, the activities they brought in, events they organized. Every event helped spawn more activities, people. Some venues were the hotbeds for many activities be it places like IIT* , JNU, Sarai, SICSR or the favourite meeting and eating joints of Luggers.
Thanks Karunakar for the updates. I see a lot of the contributions to FOSS in India have happened in the languages domain.
An article may not do full justice, what is needed is a book on FOSS in India, may collaboratively written as wikibook, if all agree to disagree and keep a lid on the flames!!
Let me do this first, then will create a public repo and see if there is more interest in maintaining it.
The key would be to keep it updated. This got started off well, but lost steam eventually
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Karunakar
-
G Karunakar -
J T Dsouza -
Rushabh Mehta -
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay -
Shakthi Kannan -
Uday Khedker -
Vikram Vincent