Three-day national conference on FOSS from July 13

Ahmedabad, July 5 (UNI) A three-day national conference on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) will be organised for the first time in India by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), here from July 13.

Briefing mediapersons here today, professor of IIM Ahmedabad, Mr B H Jajoo, who is also Chairperson of the conference, said that Open Source Software (OSS) as opposed to proprietary software is characterised by freedom to use for any purpose, freedom to study its operation, distribution and community sharing.

The amazing success of open source software projects such as Firefox, Open Office, MySQL and Ubuntu has not only increased users awareness of OSS but also convinced them that open source is a much better way of developing, distributing and consuming software, he said.

He said the FOSS will aim at building awareness on suitability of the vast range of open source solutions available to software and web developers, hardware and computer servicing companies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and students.

Open source solutions, as a user tool and business proposition, is still not a popular concept in our country. However, it is important to bring the open source revolution to the level of a common man's desktop. Over the years OSS have found entry among the software fraternity but SMEs, computer servicing firms and educational institutions are yet to adopt it in any meaningful way, he said.

Mr Jajoo said the FOSS conference has received overwhelming response from across the country from diverse sections of IT community. Among the major issues, the conference will spell out the clear meaning, definition and scope of OSS and would demonstrate through success stories that you can use OSS in your home, enterprises and what more you can be an entrepreneur using OSS, he said.

The conference will be inaugurated by B K Gairola, Director General, National Informatics Center while Srinivas Ramakrishnan, Director General CDAC will deliver the concluding address.

Apart from these luminaries, the conference will be addressed among others by Prof G Nagarjuna, Free Software Foundation of India, Prof G Sivakumar, IIT, Mumbai, Prof C N Krishnan, NRCFOSS, Stephen Braim, IBM Asia Pacific, Venkatesh Hariharan from Red Hat and Atul Chitnis from Deodesic Information Systems.

UNI