PANAJI: "There's a lot happening on the Open Source front in India. It's too important to ignore," said V. Narayanan, a Singapore-based Indian expatriate and consultant to the Centre of International Cooperation for Computerisation (CICC). CICC, funded by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) among others, is a public-interest corporation. Narayanan and CICC Singapore representative Jun Nakaya are currently in India. They have so far focussed on Wipro and IBM in Bangalore, educationists and government plans, besides a computers-in-schools project in Goa. Says Narayanan: "There's a lot of work going on here. Maybe that seems irrelevant to the common man because they have no pathways to make use of it (for now)." Educationists in Goa were keen to see how links could be built with the Far East to open wider opportunities and learning for their students. The CICC team's next halt will see visits to the National Centre for Software Technologies (NCST) and the Rajesh Jain-run Netcore in Mumbai. In Mumbai, they will meet Free Software India director G. Nagarajuna. CICC headquarters in Japan together with the Linux Users' Group in Singapore is hosting the Second Asia Open Source Software Symposium in early November in Singapore. Sometimes referred to as Open Source, and at other times called Free Software -- two names for somewhat differing approaches to build software that can be freely run, studied, redistributed and improved -- FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) movements have been gaining momentum worldwide, including in countries like India in a big way. Unlike proprietorial software, FLOSS is easily sharable, tends to be moderately priced, if at all, and is seen as particularly attractive to countries rich in talent but poor in financial resources. Much of FLOSS tends to be volunteer-built, though increasingly big companies ranging from IBM to Solaris have deployed or promoted such projects. In March 2003, the first-ever Asia Open Source Software Symposium was held in the Thai city of Phuket, sponsored by CICC's main centre at Japan, and Thailand's official National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines have come out with their own FLOSS distributions -- complete packages that run almost everything you need to do with a computer. The organisers would this time like to specifically involve countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, in addition to the Far East.
Source: IANS