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Red Hat scholarship winners
By ST Team
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Thursday, 13 July 2006, 19:30 IST
MUMBAI: Red Hat the provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, announced the winners of the Red Hat Scholarships 2005 - 2006 program.
The scholarship, conducted jointly by the eKALAVYA open source initiative at IIT Bombay and Red Hat India, is an open source programming competition.
The first place prize of Rs 2 lakh was given to a two-member team from IIT-Bombay. The second (RS 1.5 lakh) and third (RS 1 lakh) place prizes were won by all-women teams from the Cummins College of Engineering for Women, Pune and the Shri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore, respectively.
The prestigious "Lord of the Code" awards and special awards for meritorious participants were awarded in addition to the traditional first, second, and third place prizes due to the high quality entries this year.
Terming this improvement in the submission of entries as an indication of growing interest in open source, Prof. DB Phatak, Subarao M. Nilekani Chair Professor, Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, expressed happiness happy with the fact that more women have participated in this year's program.
In India, open source can play a big role in modernizing the education system by making world-class software and source code available to students and teachers. The eKALAVYA initiative of IIT Bombay and Red Hat are working together to achieve this goal," said Prof. Phatak.
The National Knowledge Commission, headed by Dr. Sam Pitroda recently recommended to the Prime Minister that India must use open source software wherever possible. Open source offers a great alternative to expensive proprietary software and has therefore become popular with the Indian industry. Many e-government projects across India are based on open
source.
The Red Hat Scholarships focuses on helping thousands of students looking for guidance on software development projects that they must submit as an integral component of their curriculum. As part of this collaborative program, students can sign up online for open source projects, seek advice from mentors in the open source community, find a list of projects they can participate in, download open source software and get information on programming standards and guidelines. The Red Hat Scholarships 2006-2007 program has been expanded to cover countries in the Indian sub-continent, including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Bhutan.