The National Conference on Open Source Software, NCOSS-09, held during 25-26 May 2009 at the Navi Mumbai campus of CDAC was inaugurated by Prof DB Phatak of IIT Mumbai. The keynote address was delivered by Prof CR Muthukrishnan, former Deputy director, IIT Chennai, and now advisor to TCS. The programme committee, chaired by S Ramakrishnan, Director General, CDAC, had representations from all sections of stake holders includingacademia, industry, open source community and government.

Inauguration of NCOSS-09: On the dais from left to right is George Arakal, Zia Saquib, CR Muthukrishnan, DB Phatak and S Ramakrishnan

The conference was spearheaded by the open source software division of CDAC Mumbai; this group was home to the OSSRC – Open Source Software Resource Centre – the first national resource centre in the area of open source, setup jointly by IIT Mumbai, IBM and CDAC Mumbai. The conference was supported by IEEE CS chapters of Mumbai and Chennai, and Computer Society of India.

The conference deliberately chose to focus on the use of open source software in the application layer, moving away from the traditional focus of desktop, operating system, etc. While there is still ample scope for further work in evangelism and FOSS adoption in the desktop level, much is now happening in that space. A number of local, regional and national events are largely aimed at this. Much of LUG activity and other FOSS advocacy groups are also focusing on this space. The issues and challenges in this space are fairly well understood. What is needed now, is time and sustained effort.

At the same time, we observe that a number of application level softwares have come of age. They are, today, mature systems with rich functionality, good user interface, and significant user and developer community. Many are comparable in most dimensions to expensive proprietary systems. One can find such systems in a wide variety of areas ranging from e-learning and e-health, to software development and testing. Moodle, Drupal, Koha, Dspace, Adempiere, Blender, Mayavi, Liferay, etc are a few of the popular systems. Most of these are fairly generic application frameworks offering a good degree of customization to adapt them to individual needs. For example, a number of educational institutes, today, have their education portal on Moodle.

However, despite the large range, good quality and customizability, these still have not attained the degree of adoption that they deserve. The causes may be lack of awareness, lack of adequate documented experiences, the usual FUD concerns, and so on. NCOSS conference was conceived with this backdrop. To retain the focus, we consciously decided to keep away merely evangelistic or kernel level or desktop adoption work from the conference.

We also wanted the presentations in the conferences to be available as readable material for potential users later on. Hence, we decided to run the conference in an academic mode, calling for full papers documenting the experiences in adapting and adopting open source application software for specific requirements. While there was some concern that open source community prefer to talk through their code, we felt it was important to encourage them to write up their work in a structured form for others, especially the non-geeky to understand and refer to.

We received over a 100 papers in response to the call for papers. Preliminary screening based on prima facie relevance to a conference on open source, followed by a thorough refereeing was carried out. Accordingly, 25 papers were selected for presentation in two parallel streams during the conference. These were compiled into the conference proceedings, which was published

by Allied publishers, New Delhi. The proceedings were edited by M Sasikumar and R Aparna, from CDAC Mumbai. Additional copies can be purchased from CDAC Mumbai.

NCOSS-09 introduced another innovation called the “demo-hall” - time slotted demos of open source solutions and systems. The focus here was on open source solutions. Preference was given to locally developed applications, and extensions of existing systems.

A view of the audience

A few demos of existing solutions – helping in spreading interest and awareness – was also included. About 15 systems were presented in this mode.

On 24^th May, there were three pre-conference tutorials on topics such as customization of Moodle, building plug-ins for open office and service oriented architecture.

In the inaugural address, Prof Phatak re-emphasised the need for India to move towards being a net giver, from the current position of being an open source consumer. He also warned against the deteriorating communication skills – particularly in the written form – among the students. Prof Muthukrishnan's keynote address looked at some of the challenges in adopting open source software, with respect to the foundational assumptions about open source movement. For example, Europe's interest in FOSS has been mostly in building local industry whereas for US, it has been financial considerations, such as cost saving. He also drew an analogy between the service offered by devotees in places like Puttaparthi (Sai Baba) and the nature of contribution by the volunteer community.

Prof Prabhu Ramachandran, the key developer of the Mayavi visualisation software, demonstrated the amazing power offered by a suite of Python based tools to produce fast, realistic 3-D simulations and rendering of results. He covered a number of Python tools including Mayavi. Mr Shuvam Misra, Merce technologies took a sharper tone in highlighting pain areas that FOSS community need to address. Through a set of carefully selected examples, he showed the continuum between pure open source and pure proprietary softwares, blurring the

The Panel discussion getting started...

distinction between the two. A number of issues including licensing (e.g. recent change of MySQL libraries from LGPL to GPL) were brought out. It was a sharp message for the FOSS community to work on. The panel discussion at the end of the conference, took on these issues further looking at “how to overcome barriers in FOSS adoption”. Mr Shrikant Mulik from LTITL, Mr Bhansal from NIC, Mr Shuvam Misra from Merce Technologies and Mr Venky Hariharan from Redhat constituted the panel which was chaired by Dr Sasikumar M from CDAC Mumbai. NIC, a major player in development and deployment of government applications including e-governance, had much to share with respect to use of FOSS.

The conference was attended by nearly a hundred delegates spanning academia, government and industry. The overall feedback from the participants were very positive on all aspects. The entire conference work from publicity to local arrangements were done by a small team of staff from the ETU, OSSD and KBCS divisions at the Navi Mumbai campus of CDAC, under the guidance of Sasikumar M, assisted by Aparna R. The conference structure and organisation was based on the earlier KBCS stream of conferences organised by CDAC Mumbai.

Inauguration Session

Shri S.Ramakrishnan, D.G. C-DAC

Prof.D.B.Phatak, IIT Bombay

Prof.C.R.Muthukrishnan, Ex-Director IIT Madras

Prof.Prabhu Ramachandran, IIT Bombay

Shri Shuvam Misra, Founder-CEO Merce Technologies

Dr.S.Srinivasan, C-DAC Chennai

Panel Discussion "Circumventing Barriers to FOSS adoption".

The Participants

Wrap-up

Inauguration by :
Dr.Deepak Phatak
(IIT, Bombay)

Keynote address by:
Prof. C R Muthukrishnan,
(Ex-Director IIT, Madras)

Invited talks by :
Prof.Prabhu Ramachandran
(IIT, Bombay)

Mr. Shuvam Misra
(Merce Technologies Pvt.Ltd.) more details...

NCOSS-09 at a glance: Schedule.