Compiled by Frederick Noronha

India, with its population of one-billion plus, has a rich tech talent,
considerable interest in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and a network
of some 80-plus user groups across its landmass (some active, some less).
This offers wide potential.

But officialdom -- apart from a few high-profile statements -- have been
slow to wake up to the world of FOSS. Not enough is being done to promote
FOSS in higher education, though the official syllabus.

There are impressively-large user groups in places like Bangalore, Delhi,
Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad. There are also nationwide networks like the
Linux India network and the Free Software Foundation-India (headquartered in
Kerala in South India). In addition, a ring of medium-sized user-groups have
also proliferated in smaller cities and towns, taking the technology right
into the hands of the user-practitioner.

But much remains to be done in terms of providing official support for FOSS
growth in a region which could surely benefit hugely from it.

Below are links to some interesting developments from the field, across
India.

Indian language initiatives

---------------------------

IndLinuX project was started to provide Indian Language support for
GNU/Linux OS at both console and XLibrary level. URL:
http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/

Zha Kanini is an effort to provide a Tamil Desktop consisting of FOSS
Applications. The objective is to enable any Tamil user to use a computer
even without English proficiency/knowledge. URL: http://www.zhakanini.org/

Indic Computing, localisation
-----------------------------

Indic Computing http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/
Mailing list at Indic-computing-users@lists.sourceforge.net

TAMIL-LINux/unIX
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/
A group involved in the development of Tamil on Linux/Unix. Members are
self-interested enthusiasts who contribute in their free time. Anyone is
free to join this group and contribute to Tamil on Linux/Unix.

o Free CDs spread FOSS in India: CNET News.com reported on May 25, 2005
about an initiative by the Indian government to "encourage the use of
computers across the country by distributing free CDs that contain localized
versions of popular open-source applications". The government has started
distributing CDs containing Tamil-language versions of various open-source
applications, including the Firefox browser, the OpenOffice.org productivity
suite and the Columba e-mail client. It plans to freely distribute 3.5
million copies of the CD to Tamil speakers worldwide, Centre for the
Development of Advanced Computing researcher R.K.V.S. Raman was quoted
saying. Raman said: ""We have had a tremendous response to this
(initiative). In the first two weeks of the campaign we got about 100,000
hits daily on the Web site offering CDs, and about 2,000 to 3,000 downloads
(of Tamil-language applications). We have already sent out around 50,000 CDs
and have a backlog of 35,000."
http://news.com.com/Free+CDs+spread+open+source+in+India/
2100-7344_3-5720008.html?tag=cd.top

BharateeyaOO is a Unicode <http://www.unicode.org> based office suite in
Indian languages which can be used across all major platforms.
Self-description: "One of the main objectives of this project is to reach
out to the masses, breaking language barriers and physical boundaries,
through the support for not only Indian languages but for international
languages as well." BharateeyaOO calls itself "a Unicode based office suite
and thus provides rich support to a number of natural Indian languages as
well as any international languages". The BharateeyaOO.o project is an
initiative to bring Open Office -- http://www.openoffice.org -- to India *in
Indian languages*, by the ICT Research and Training Centre (India) --
http://www.ictrt.org.in/ It is being done as part of activities of the
Development Gateway Foundation http://www.developmentgateway.org

The Linux Localisation Initiative
Project Website http://lli.linux-bangalore.org/
Description The Linux Localization Initiative aims to translate Linux
documentation provided by the Linux Documentation Project
(www.linuxdoc.org) and its contributors, into Indian languages. This
long and boring sentence should give you an idea about the labors ahead.
There are quite a few languages apart from Hindi, which is of course the
national language of India. A selection includes Bengali, Marathi,
Konkani, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarathi, Punjabi,
Sanskrit, Urdu, and Tulu.

Project Indlinux(Indian Language Support for Linux Operating System)

Project Website http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/
Description Indlinux team is a part of the TeNeT?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=TeNeT> (Telecommunication
and Networking) group, dedicated to work on "Localisation of Linux to
support Indian Languages". A team of people under the guidance of Dr.
Hema A. Murthy and Dr. Timothy A. Gonsalves work on the localisation
project.

Project IndiX: Indian Language support for the Linux Operating System
Project Website http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix
Description A modified X server to support Indian languages using
opentype fonts. Uses Unicode. Seeks to bring Indic support at the OS
level on GNU/Linux. Others too agree that NCST's (the Govt of India's
Mumbai-based National Centre for Software Technology) localization work
is promising, both for Indix and OpenOffice?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=OpenOffice> in Hindi.

Project Ved
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/ved/
Description Explores indian holy books that are in sanskrit & translate
them in english beside this project will also speak sanskrit shaloks
which user will select it is useful for the peoples working on indian
culture

Project itrans
Developer: Avinash Chopde
Project Website http://www.aczone.com/itrans/
Description itrans by Avinash Chopde is a package for printing texts in
Indian languages. It uses English-encoded text for input, and it
supports the Devanagiri script (used for writing Hindi and some other
Indian languages), Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi,
and Romanized Sanskrit. Input files can be in TeX?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=TeX>, LaTeX?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=LaTeX>, HTML, or
PostScript? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=PostScript>
format, and Unicode output is supported.

Project Dhvani
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhvani/
Description dhvani is a text-to-speech system for Indian languages
developed by the Simputer Trust developers and others. It is promising
to soon have a better phonetic engine, Java port, language independent
framework.

Project Acharya -- website for multilingual (Indian) systems...
Project Website http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/perl_enhance.html
Description From the Systems Development Laboratory of the IIT-Madras.
It was taking time to download, and I gotta run... but these guys are
doing some great work at IITM. Keep it up!
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/perl_enhance.html . The source of the software
libraries has been GPLed. Here is the project link
http://sourceforge.net/projects/imli/ FOOTNOTE: Just before closing, I
got it... this page is about the use of Indian scripts with PERL.
"Nearly a decade ago, it was reported that Sanskrit is the most
appropriate language for writing computer software. The report, quoted
as having been published in the Forbes magazine, seems to have caught
the attention of scholars all over India. Unfortunately, no one seems to
have asked if this were feasible! Worse still, Forbes Magazine never
carried such a report."

Project Oriya
Developers: Gora Mohanty, Rajesh Pradhan
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/oriya/
Description Linux in oriya is the initiative for making linux available
in Oriya.

Tamil
Project gtamilocr
Developer(s) Visweswara and Team
Project Website http://gtamilocr.sourceforge.net
Description gtamilocr project has released the alpha version of
cross-platform GUI based Tamil Optical Character Recognizer(OCR)
software under GPL. It will recognize pretrained printed characters.
Students are invited to join in this project.

Project Tamillinux Distro
Project Website http://www.tamillinux.org/

Project Kannada Localisation Initiative
Project Website http://kannada.sourceforge.net
Description Kannada l10n project

Project Project Maitre
Developer: Pramod
Description Project Maitre aims to create an infrastructure for rural
and/or public schools wanting to implement Linux on their PC’s with
Kannada support.

Project OpenOffice.org in Kannada
Project Website http://kannada.sourceforge.net/projects/openoffice.org/
Description OpenOffice.org in Kannada will undoubtedly bring the benefits of
this Office Suite to more people. The first build of Openoffice.org in
Kannada is ready now. If you are interested in helping with the project, you
can help us with testing the builds, filing bug reports, giving feedback on
translations, doing further translations, etc.,

Project Kannada language pack for moodle
Project Website http://kannada.sourceforge.net/moodle/
Description Kannada Language pack for moodle is now available. The
translations were done as part of the ongoing Kannada l10n project, with
a tad bit of support from IISc.

Project Malayalam for LaTeX?
Developer: Alex A.J.
Project Website http://malayalam.sarovar.org/
Description The Malayalam Package offers a set of macros and fonts for
typesetting Malayalam, which is the primary language of an estimated 33
million people in the South Indian state of Keralam.

Project AkRti
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/akrti/
Description AkRti? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=AkRti>
is a framework to facilitate easier development of applications that can
handle the Indian language Telugu. The modular architecture decouples
the input method, the underlying syllable based representation and the
on screen display/print.

Project Anusaaraka
Project Website http://www.iiit.net/ltrc/Anusaaraka/anu_home.html
Description Anusaaraka is a computer software which renders text from
one Indian language into another. It produces output which is
comprehensible to the reader, although at times it might sound odd. For
example, a Telugu to Hindi anusaaraka can take a Telugu text and produce
output in Hindi which can be understood by a Hindi reader. However, the
reader will require some amount of training for reading the output.

Project GNU/Linux Telugu Localization Effort
Project Website http://telugu.sarovar.org/
Description The project aims at localizing most common applications on
GNU/Linux to Telugu including GNOME, KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=OpenOffice>. Attempt is
being made to solve technical challenges such providing proper input,
display, printing, locales, spell checking etc.

FOSS in Education initiatives
-----------------------------

Linux in Education (India)
Gnoware http://www.gnowledge.org/

Gnosys mailing lists
By 'gnowledge' we mean the knowledge accessible freely for the community in
general, and to the users of the WWW in particular.
http://www.gnowledge.org/Data/ObjectType/mailinglists/index_html/

Linux @ Schools http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux_schools/

LIFE-GNU in Edn life at mm.hbcse.tifr.res.in
LIFE-2 life at hbcse.tifr.res.in
LIFE-Nagarajuna G. nagarjun at hbcse.tifr.res.in
LIFEAdmin life-admin at hbcse.tifr.res.in

Indians in the FOSS diaspora
----------------------------

It has generally been said that Indians aren't contributing sufficiently to
the world of FOSS, by way of specific code contributions. This is proving to
be untrue, as the contributions are increasingly getting noticed, and more
from India get access to Internet connectivity -- which is essential for
contributing to such projects.

On the other hand, the contribution of people-of-Indian-origin (POIs) to the
global Free/Open Source Software experiment is worth speficially noting.
Some prominent contributors are (i) Tushar Joshi <tjoshi@lonix.org> who
founded the London-based user-group LONIX http://www.lonix.org (ii)
Malaysia-based Dinesh Nair <dinesh@alphaque.com> who is known for his FOSS
evangelism, code contributions etc (iii) Rishab Aiyer-Ghosh in the
Netherlands (iv) Niranjan Rajani, who though not coming strictly from India
has his roots in the sub-continent, i.e. Sind in Pakistan
<niranjan.rajani@maailma.net> (iv) Harish Pillay <harish@lugs.org.sg> in
Singapore (v) former IIT-Madras alumni V Narayanan <narav@cicc.org.sg> is a
consultant to Singapore's Centre of the International Cooperation for
Computerization (vi) Sunil Abraham of Bangalore who has been IOSN.net
manager (vii) Anand Babu, playing a key role in the (though delayed)
development of the GNU kernel known as the Hurd (viii) Manoj Srivastava who
was the Debian project secretary as of March 2005 <srivasta@debian.org>
<http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/ (ix) the founders of the Middle East
LUG, GSC Prabhakar James http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Linux-middleeast/
among others.

-----------------------------------------
FOOTNOTE: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is currently leading the FLOSSWorld Project
which aims “to strengthen Europe’s leadership in FLOSS and open standards
research, building a global constituency with partners from Argentina,
Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, India, Malaysia and South Africa.”
Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), states the site, “is arguably one
of the best examples of open, collaborative, internationally distributed
production and development that exists today, resulting in tremendous
interest from around the world, from government, policy, business, academic
research and developer communities.” This 3-year project, funded by the
European Commission, was launched on May 1, 2005.
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/ict/rc/ItemDetail.do~1040381

Involvement in wider projects
-----------------------------

Anand Babu (FSF-India) has developed Gluster, a meta GNU/Linux Cluster
Distribution for HPC and Super Computing. URL:
http://www.gnu.org/nongnu/gluster

Vijay Kumar (Ex GLUG-Trichy Co-Ordinator) has written a tutorial
about GtkTextView Widget and CVSCheat Sheet.
URL: http://www.bravegnu.org/

Shakthi (ILUGC-Member) rewritten the Linux Device Driver example programs,
from Rubini's Book, in a very simple manner. So that a beginner can
understand the code very easily. URL: http://www.shakthimaan.com

Gauravp Sharmad has developed GLibMS (GNU Library Management
System), a Library management software developed using PHP and
PostgreSQL to automate the library activities.
URL http://sourceforge.net/projects/glibs (Thanks FSUG-Bglr)

Ajay, Binand and RajaSubramanian (ILUG Chennai-Member) jointly developed the
TransConnect. It allows one to connect to remote machines on any port, using
HTTP Tunneling. URL: http://transconnect.sourceforge.net/

Joe Steeve (ILUGC-Member) and team has developed the IJammer, an Instant
Messenger Jammer. IJammer is a Daemon that runs on one workstation of a LAN
and prevents any IM traffic on that LAN. URL:
http://sarovar.org/projects/ijammer/

Amit Kale has developed kgdb, a source level debugger for Linux
Kernel. It is used along with gdb to debug Linux Kernel.
URL http://kgdb.linsyssoft.com/

Avinash has developed the iTrans package for printing texts in many Indian
languages and encodings. URL: http://www.aczone.com/itrans/

Source of many of the above links are:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ilugc/ and
http://linuxinindia.pitas.com

Anjuta: The goal of Anjuta DevStudio is to provide a truely customizable and
extensible IDE framework and at the same time provide the basic
implementations of common development tools. libanjuta is the framework that
realizes the Anjuta IDE plugin framework and Anjuta DevStudio realizes many
of the common development plugins. It has been widely noticed in the outside
world, and is developed by the Delhi-based developer Naba Kumar.
http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/

Project Glibms (GNU Library Management System)
Developers: gauravp sharmad
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/glibs
Description Glibms is Library management software developed using PHP
and PostgreSQL <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=PostgreSQL>
to automate the different activities carried out in the library.

Project Karuna
Developer: Sharmad Naik
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/karuna/
Description This project is a library management system designed to
automate a library. Taken into consideration all the aspects of a
library like search, issue/retrieval, acquisition and other aspects of a
library

Project TransConnect?
Developers: Ajay Kumar Dwivedi and Binand Raj S . Credits also to Raja
Subramanian, among others
Project Website http://transconnect.sourceforge.net/
Description This program allows you "almost complete" access to the
Internet, through a HTTP proxy like squid. Chirag Kantharia, who's using
this, describes it as software that "allows one to connect to remote
machines on any port, using http tunneling".

Project GNOWSYS: Gnowledge Networking and Organizing System
Developer: Nagarjuna G.
Project Website http://www.gnu.org/software/gnowsys/
Description: It is official GNU project. It is a hybrid knowledge base with
semantic computing features for both declarative and procedural knowledge.
More details and live demonstration of the application can be seen from
http://www.gnowledge.org/gnowsys/. It is a part of http://www.gnowledge.org
project supported by Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
(http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/), Tata Insitute of Fundamental Research.

Project IMV (Information Meta View)
Developer: Vinod G Kulkarni
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/imv/
Description "Information Meta View (IMV) system attempts to create a web
standard for information storage in a decentralized database.
Information is stored as a graph like structure spanning several service
providers."

Project Calpp (Computer Aided Legal Procedures and Proceedings)
Developer: Ramanraj
Project Website http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/calpp/projdisplay.php
Description Calpp aids in defining legal procedures and executing those
procedures as proceedings. Calpp uses Postgresql and PHP to create Calpp
powered legal systems.

Project bzip2 translator
Developers: Ankur Arora, Shikka Garg and V. Venakataraman
Project Website
http://www.gnu-india.org/pipermail/gnu-india/20010307/000113.html (Release)
Description Ankur Arora, Shikka Garg and V. Venakataraman wrote this
translator. When mapped on a file, you can do bzip compressed I/O.
Capabilities include translating a read call, supporting SEEK_* in
lseek, and dynamically determines the length of the file (which
incidentally is a very slow operation, because the way the way the bz2
library has been written, the only way to find out the length of the
uncompressed file is to uncompress it). It has some "major problems"
too... concede the developers....

Project Genie
Developer: Arun Sharma
Project Website
http://www.sharma-home.net/people/adsharma/projects/genie/index.html
Description Genie is an open source, web based application to maintain
genealogy databases.

Project Cyberoam Authentication Client
Developer: Amish Mehta
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/cyberoam/
Description Cyberoam Authentication Client for various platforms(e.g
Linux) for 24hr online internet on cable service.

Project GNUYahoo
Developers: Balamurugan, Nagappan, Gopal, Ramesh, Vishwanathan, Anand
Babu, Mridul Jain... and above all, Parag Mehta
Project Website http://gnuyahoo.sourceforge.net/
Description GNU Yahoo is a freely available GNU messenger for Yahoo! It
was started by few of GNU hackers at end of the year 2000. GNU Yahoo is
a purely console based application which has a geeky "readline" and
"guile" interfaces. It connects to the Yahoo server using the "libyahoo"
library.

Project JPA (Java Personal Assistant
Developer: Karthikeyan
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/jpa/
Description PA (Java Personal Assistant) will have the following modules

* Task & Event Organiser
* Birthday & Anniversary Reminder
* Personalised Mail Notification
* Chat Facility||

Project Kpopup
Developers: Santhosh Janardhanan Varghese B George
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/kpopup/
Description This is a chat/instant messenger, whish can be used in both
internet and intranet. Coded in VC++. Done by a group of boys who love
programming. This messenger have Linux and Windows Versions. We can send
inter Operating system messages and alerts

Project Y-Chat - A Yahoo Chat Client in Java
Developer: Pushkar
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/ychat/
Description Y-Chat is a Yahoo chat client written entirely in Java and
hence runs on anything that has a JRE. It has two unique features,
namely - "simultaneous multiple ID login" and "simultaneous multiple
lobby joins".

Project Gym
Developer: Druvan S
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/gym/
Description This is a JAVA based Yahoo Messenger Client. It supports
unicode, so naturally Users can use any language. As it is Java based,
it should work on all Java supported platforms. GYM!-J also provides a
console edition also.

Project jymessenger
Developer(s) Pushkar
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/jymessenger/
Description this is a Yahoo messenger client written entirely in Java
currently it supports login,send PM messages,receive PM messages,send
Buzz,new mail notifications,logout... it is basicallly a UI to jYmsg
project from Sourceforge

Project ijammer
Developer(s) Joe Steeve, Ananth Shrinivas S, Arun Ponniah S
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/ijammer/
Description IJammer is an instant messenger jammer. Instant messengers
are a nuisance in some LAN environments ( a.k.a College Networks ).
IJammer is a network daemon that runs on One workstation of a LAN and
prevents any IM traffic on that lan.

Development

Project GNU/LDTP
Developer(s) Nagappan A
Project Website http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp
Description GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project

Project Octave-GTK
Developer(s) Hemant Kumar, Ramasamy, R Saravana Manickam, Muthiah,
Dhruvkaran N. Mehta
Project Website http://octave-gtk.sourceforge.net/
Description Octave GTK+ is a set of Octave bindings for GTK, to help
develop GUI programs from Octave, with GTK+. It aims to aid fast
creation of scientific programs that need GUIs as well as number
crunching power

Project KDOC (API doc generation tool)
Developer(s) Sirtaj Singh Kang 'tag' with KDE Team
Project Website
Description

Project kgdb
Developer(s) Amit Kale
Project Website http://kgdb.linsyssoft.com/
Description KGDB is a source level debugger for linux kernel. It is used
along with gdb to debug linux kernel. Kernel developers can debug a
kernel similar to application programs with use of KGDB. It makes it
possible to place breakpoints in kernel code, step through the code and
observe variables.

Project Anjuta IDE
Developer(s) Kh. Naba Kumar Singh.
Project Website http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/
Description Anjuta is a versatile IDE for C and C++, written for
GTK/GNOME. Features include project management, application wizards, an
onboard interactive debugger, and a powerful source editor with browsing
and syntax highlighting.

Documentation

Project GNU/Linux in One Stanza (GNU-Lost)
Developer(s)
Project Website http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/howtos (ML)
Description GNU-LOST project that makes it easy to learn GNU/Linux by
giving out one-stanza tips

Project Newbie's Guide to Linux
Developer(s) Sameer Dilip Sahasrabuddhe
Project Website http://db.ilug-bom.org.in/Documentation/NGL/
Description The most appropriate time to read the NGL is when you are
seriously thinking of trying out Linux for the first time, when you have
started planning towards your first installation and when you are about
to try out your newly installed Linux box for the first time.

Project pdftexfaq
Developer(s) CV Radhakrishnan
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/pdftexfaq/
Description Freqently asked questions about pdfTeX, variant of TeX?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=TeX> that write out PDF
directly.

Administration Utilities

Project Qryptix
Developer Sivasankar Chander
Project Website http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/qryptix
Description Qryptix,consists of a PAM object and utilities for session &
key management for encrypted Home Dir using the International Kernel
(CryptoAPI? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=CryptoAPI>)
patches for Linux.

Project biosconfig
Project Website http://www.nongnu.org/biosconfig/
Description biosconfig reads or writes fields in the CMOS non-volatile
store, most of which are associated with various functions of the PC
Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). The fields, their types and value
ranges are specified in a configuration file in the style of GNUstep.
This format is familiar to users of the WindowMaker?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=WindowMaker> window manager
or applets written for it.

Project Gluster
Developers: Anand Babu, Balamurugan
Project Website http://www.nongnu.org/gluster/
Description Gluster operating system provides an extensible framework
for developing cluster extensions and applications.

Project Citybus
Developer: Arun Sharma
http://www.sharma-home.net/people/adsharma/projects/citybus/citybus.html
Description Citybus is an open source project to help the general public in
India (or anywhere else for that matter) view public transport information
on the web. The data is not there yet, but the code was reported as being
80% complete.

Project RPCAP (Remote Packet Capture system)
Developer: S. Krishnan
Project Website http://rpcap.sourceforge.net/
Description RPCAP is a Remote Packet Capture system. It enables you to
run a packet capture program (the server) on a target computer, which
will sniff the network traffic on that system, and uplink the captured
packets to another host (the client), where the captured packets can be
processed, analysed and archived .

Project MGET
Developer: Debajyoti Bera
Project Website http://freshmeat.net/projects/mget
Description mget is a command line download manager. "It splits the file
into a number of segments and uses several separate threads to download
each segment. It can handle proxies." It's by Debajyoti Bera. IIT, of
course. dbera@iitk.ac.in. http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/dbera/index.html

Project httptype
Developer: Philip S Tellis
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/httptype/
Description Perl based httptype reads a list of http hosts and
optionally the port number for each of these. It then queries each of
the hosts and displays the HTTP server software of the host.

Project GNU Freeipmi
Developers: Anand Babu and team
Project Website http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freeipmi/
Description "Remote-Console" (out-of-band) and "System Management Software"
(in-band) based on IPMI v1.5/2.0 specification.

Project GNUSim8085
Developer: Sridhar R (ILUGC-Member & Final Year Engg Student)
Project Website http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gnusim8085/
Description GNUSim8085, Simulator and Assembler for the 8085 Microprocessor.

Project MayaVi
Developer: Dr.Prabhu Ramachandran
Project Website http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/
Description MayaVi? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=MayaVi>
- A Free, Cross Platform, Easy to use GUI based scientific data
visualizer, written in Python VTK.

Project Tuxedo
Developer: Ananth Shrinivas S
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/tuxedo/
Description Tuxedo is a distributed chess engine. It is an engine
running a single chess game on a linux cluster for Deeper Ply Search and
faster move generation.

Project Gipi
Developer: Dinker Charak
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/gipi/
Description Gipi is a console based jumble like puzzle game. Guess is a
word guessing game.

Project Ashish Gulhati's Perl modules
Developer: Ashish Gulhati
Project Website http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/AGUL/
Description You can do "various things" with these Perl modules.
Checkboxes, radiobuttons, three styles of pushbottons, selection
listboxes, an extensible editbox, scrollable viewbox, single-line text
entry fields, menubar with pulldown menus, and full popup dialog boxes
with multiple controls... also an object-oriented interface to PGP5,
object persistence in SQL databases/PostgreSQL?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=PostgreSQL>.

Project JavaDBF? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=JavaDBF>
Developer Anil Kumar K.
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/javadbf/
Description JavaDBF?
<http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=JavaDBF> is a Java library
for reading and writing Xbase (dBase/DBF) files. This library is useful
when you want to exchange data with another application which can
accept/provide only DBF files.

Project Perl extension for an Interactive Voice Response System
Developer(s) Mukund Deshmukh
Project Website http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=IVRS
Description Mukund Deshmukh's Perl extension for an Interactive Voice
Response System. Mukund is at Nagpur, visit http://www.betacomp.com/
Ivrs-0.07.tar.gz was released in Feb 2001. It works like this: someone
phones a number, the system picks the call and a pre-recorded message is
played out. 24 x 7. Your caller gets a voice menu -- to select the info
(s)he wants. Besides, the caller can feed in his input info (access
code, ID number, etc) through the phone dial-pad. Based on his/her
choice, the relevant voice message is played back. It works in any language!

Project Ptf
Developer(s) Davor Ocelic
Project Website http://sarovar.org/projects/ptf
Description Perl Information and frontend framework for the Prelude
Hybrid IDS

Project Hymn (PlayFair)
Developer(s) Anand Babu (Maintainer
Project Website http://playfair.org/
Description The project has been renamed Hymn, according to Anand Babu,
the maintainer of the project. It is being hosted on two sites
(http://playfair.org/ and http://hymn-project.org) by a U.S.-based
hosting service provider.

Community Projects

Project Sarovar
Developer(s)
Project Website http://sarovar.org
Description Sarovar.org is India's first portal to host projects under
Free/Open source licenses. It is located in Trivandrum, India and hosted
at Asianet data center. Sarovar.org is customised, installed and
maintained by Linuxense as part of their community services and
sponsored by River Valley Technologies.

Project GnuIndia? <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=GnuIndia>
Developer(s)
Project Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuindia/
Description Other initiatives have also come up, like the GNU India
Translation Project (GTP) by gnu_india. It aims at the localization of
GNU/Linux program into the native languages of india.

Project StupidOS <http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?action=edit;id=StupidOS>
project
Developer(s)
Project Website http://www.geocities.com/stupidosproject/
Description

Free software projects list

See the listing at the site below
http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?IndianFreeSoftwareProjects

Linking networks with the next
------------------------------

Nithin Kamath <knithink@gmail.com> offers a newsletter about GNU/Linux and
FOSS via email. See the text version of LinTux Newsletter at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lintux HTML version is at
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/lintux

In addition, the large network of user groups (some active, some not so) act
as a vital channel for news updates. Also see the GNULinuxInIndia newsletter
at http://www.freelists.org/list/linuxinindia

LUGs, FSUGs, GLUGs
-------------------------------------------

What is indeed surprising is the large number of Free Software User Groups,
Linux User Groups and GNU/Linux User Groups, which are visible all over the
country of 1 billion plus. See a listing at http://wikiwikiweb.de/LugsList

Below is a listing of user groups within India:

GNU/Linux links and lists (India)

All India networks
Free Software Foundation of India http://fsf.org.in/
Linux India network http://www.linux-india.org/

Linux India General
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-general/

Linux India Help
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-help

Linux India Programmers
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-programmers

BSD India http://www.bsd-india.org

BSD India mailing list http://www.bsd-india.org/mailinglist.html

Linux In India http://www.freelists.org/archives/linuxinindia/

GNU/Linux localization http://indlinux.org/

Regional networks in India
Northern India
ILUG-Delhi http://linux-delhi.org/

ILUG-Indore http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-indore/

Kanpur LUGK http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lugk/

Linux-Chandigarh http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux_chandigarh

Sun City Jodhpur LUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/suncityjodhpurlug

Apart from the mailing list, a website at
http://www.geocities.com/sunnylug/

Linux Lucknow http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-lucknow/

Raipur http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug_raipur/

Bhopal http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lug-bhopal/

Rourkee http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rklug/

LUG of Dehradoon http://lists.asiaosc.org/mailman/listinfo/lugdoon

Address for posting is lugdoon at lists.asiaosc.org

Linux Gurus Bhopal http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux_gurus/

Southern India
Linux Bangalore http://linux-bangalore.org/blug/

twincling - Professionally managed Linux society Hyderabad
http://www.twincling.org/

Linux - Technical n Tutorials Bangalore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vtplinux/

ILUG-Chennai (Madras) http://www.chennailug.org/

Chennai wiki http://www.chennailug.org/wiki/Main_Page

ILUG-Cochin http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-cochin/

ILUG-Coimbatore http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-cbe/

ILUG-Coimbatore http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cbe-linux/

ILUG-SREC(Sri Ramakrishna Engg College)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/srec-lug

KLUG (Kongu Engg College, Erode) - Mail list -
http://mail.kongu.edu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/klug

ILUG-KTM (Kottayam) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-ktm/

Website http://www.ilug-ktm.tk

ILUG-Belgaum http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-belgaum/

ILUG-Mangalore http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-mangalore/

ILUG-Hyderabad LUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilughyd/

ILUG-Hyderabad http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-hyd/

ILUG-Trivandrum (Kerala) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-tvm/

GLUG-T(GNU/Linux User Group - Trichy) http://glugt.linuxisle.com/

ALUG - Andhra Linux Users Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alug_linux/

AP LUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aplug/

ILUG-Hubli http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linuxhubli/

PSG-GNULinuxClub http://groups.yahoo.com/PSG-GNULinuxClub/

GLUG-Madurai http://www.glug-madurai.org/

Mailing list at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/glug-madurai-discuss

GLUGOT (GNU/Linux User Group of TCE) http://cepserver.tce.edu/glugot/

Mailing list at http://cepserver.tce.edu/mailman/listinfo/glugot

Tamil Linux http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamillinux/

Tiruvannamalai LUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tvmalailug/

FSUG-Kochi (Kerala) http://puggy.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi

FSUG-Cusat http://fsug-cusat.port5.com

FSUG-Calicut http://www.geocities.com/fsug_calicut/

FSUG-Banglore http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/

FSUG-Thrissur http://groups-beta.google.com/group/fsug-tsr/

GLUGC NIT calicut http://glugc.nitc.ac.in

MyLUG - Mysore Linux Users' Group http://mylug.org/

RVCE (Bangalore) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rvcelug/

Sona College of Technology, Salem Sona LUG
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sonalug/

Western India
India GNU/Linux Users Group Mumbai http://ilug-bom.org.in/

Mailing list at http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers

ILUG-Nagpur http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nagpur-linux/

Nagpur http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nagpur-lug/

Linux At Ahmedabad http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linuxatahmedabad/

ILUG-South Maharashtra http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug_sm/

ILUG-Goa http://ilug-goa.swiki.net/ (On Swiki.net)

ILUG-Goa http://iluggoa.iosn.net/ (On IOSN.net)

ILUG-Goa mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa

Linux Goa Help List http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linuxgoahelp/

Linux Ahmedabad http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux-ahmedabad-users/

Linux Users Group of Ahmedabad (LUGA) http://www.lugaforums.org/

ILUG-DAIICT http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug_daiict/ Dhirubhai Ambani
Institute of ICT, Gujarat

Gnunify, Pune http://gnunify.sicsr.ac.in/

Mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnunify/

Pune GNU/Linux User Group http://plug.org.in

Linux at UVPCE, Mehsana http://groups.yahoo.com/group/uvpce_lug/

Eastern India
ILUG-Cal Kolkata Chapter http://www.ilug-cal.org/

Mailing lists link at http://www.ilug-cal.org/?q=node/view/3 Archive of
list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-cal/

ILUG-Burdwan (West Bengal) http://ilug-bwn.org

Mailing list Burdwan
http://www.ilug-bwn.org/mailman/listinfo/ilug-bwn_ilug-bwn.org Archives:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-bwn Contact mail-id : thecyberzone at
gmail.com, webmaster at ilug-bwn.org

Bandel LUG -- CSSLUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/csslug/

ILUG-Bhubaneswar (Orissa) http://ilug-bbsr.sf.net/

Mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-bbsr/

Bihar Linux User Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biharlinuxusergroup/

Patna Linux Users Group http://lists.asiaosc.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

Mizoram http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mizolinxusergroup/

North East LUG Kokrajhar http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nelug-discussion/

LUG NGFOSS http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ngfossf/

Polar Players GNU/LUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/polarplayersglug/

Nixal GNU/Linux User Group of Netaji Subhash Engineering College,
Kolkata http://www.nongnu.org/gug-nixal

Miscellaneous
Linux Council of India
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Linux_Council_of_India/

Linux on Yahoogroups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linux/

AMCLUG http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amclug/

Codebreaker http://groups.yahoo.com/group/codebreaker/

Promoting FOSS, in print
------------------------

India is one of the few countries in Asia (probably with Indonesia) which
has a regular, commercially-published monthly magazine focussing on Free and
Open Source Software. Called Linux For You it is available at
http://www.linuxforu.com/

Software Freedom Day
--------------------

Groups in different parts of the country have taken an active part in
observing Software Freedom Day over 2004 and 2005. See
http://softwarefreedomday.org/

One Day, One Command
--------------------

'One Day One Command' is an initiative by Bharathi S. The idea is to share
skills about FLOSS through brief 'commands' explained daily via email. This
does seem a useful idea to spread such technologies.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ilugc/

A GTK widget every day
----------------------

Muthiah Annamalai (GTK-Octave Team) is started writing a simple intro about
one GTK widget every day. URL:
http://gtkbook.sourceforge.net/aboutdialog.html
[Problem with URL, returning 404 on July 3, 2005]

Overseas collaboration
----------------------

In May 2005, FOSS ideas were sought to be taken beyond software, and across
the continents. Free Software Foundation of India organised a four-country
meet, which brought participants from Venezuela, Brazil, Italy (and, for
part of the meeting, Bangladesh too) together. "The Free Software movement
has shown a new way of knowledge creation based of collaboration and social
ownership. This conference explores the possibilities of applying the Free
Software model in addressing broader questions such as governance, digital
inclusion, development and culture," one of the event's key organisers Arun
M said. http://fsfs.hipatia.net

Governance
----------

FSF-Bangalore, the local Free Software network, has put up a site -- still
in a rudimentary form at the time of writing (July 2005) -- which makes a
case for the use of FOSS in government.

http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?Proposal_for_wider_Free_Software_usage_in_Government

Challenging the software patents issue
--------------------------------------

FOSS software developers in India have strongly opposed -- and lobbied
against -- patents on software, saying the move would hit small and medium
software enterprises in the country while promoting the interests of
multinational corporations. In December 2004, a presidential ordinance
threatened to bring software under patents, causing much angst among
software developers and geeks nationwide. After considerable lobbying, the
software developers say they managed to avert the "threat".

"We've gone back to the status quo (pre-December 2004 situation). We're glad
that the immediate threat to allow software patents has gone. But there are
still issues of concern that remain," Dr G. Nagarjuna, chairperson of the
Mumbai-based Free Software Foundation (India), told this writer. Nagarjuna
said some parliamentarians, social organisations and the pharma industry had
helped to get the government to do a re-think about software patenting in
India.

"But we still want two things changed. We want four software patents issued
in India to be revoked, and we want the phrase which says that 'software per
se' cannot be patented droppped," Nagarjuna said. "Patents on software don't
help the developers. In today's scenario, it helps the multinationals who
claim the most patents. In most cases, the developer is just an employer who
signs a contract saying all he develops is the property of the company by
which he is employed. Very rarely does an individual get patents," he said.

He brushed aside the official explanation that "software combined with
hardware is patentable" as "illogical". Software never works by itself, but
always in combination with hardware, he pointed out.

Nagarjuna criticised Nasscom, the apex software industry body, for not
protecting the interests of geeks in India, which has one of the most
influential software developer community in the world. Anand Babu, another
geek in his mid-twenties, said: "Even in the US, patents didn't help the
software industry. It's just the investors who get to own patents. Patenting
software is a stupid idea because software is about thousands of ideas that
go into even a simple programme". Babu is better known for building what
once was the world's second-fastest computer, 'Thunder', in the Bay Area of
Silicon Valley in the US. Abhas Abhinav, who heads the Bangalore-based
DeepRoot Linux firm, said: "India did the right thing (by rejecting patents
on software). I guess if we campaign hard enough, it won't happen."

Links:
G Nagarjuna nagarjun@hbcse.tifr.res.in
Anand Babu ab@gnu-india.org
Abhas Abhinav abhas@deeproot.co.in

See FSF-I representation: Representation made by the Free Software
Foundation of India to the Government of India, urging the withdrawal of the
Patents (Amendment) Ordinance, 2004, (Ordinance No. 7 of 2004) with regard
to amendments made to Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970.
http://bangalore.gnu.org.in/?search=FSF-I+representation

Red Hat initiative in India
---------------------------

Red Hat has been offering incentives for young Indians to go into coding. In
2004, the firm announced Red Hat Scholarships -- The Open Source Challenge.
It has been conducted jointly with the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information
Technology, IIT Bombay. It says the Red Hat Scholarships are "the first ever
open source program of its kind in the world designed to encourage young
talent and spread the open source philosophy that has created world class
software like [GNU]Linux, Apache and many other programs".

Said Red Hat: "We believe that India can make an immense contribution to the
open source community world wide. The Red Hat Scholarships are focused on
solving practical, real-life problems that are of importance to Linux users
worldwide. The experience of participating in Red Hat Scholarships will
therefore help the students when they graduate and become part of the
information technology industry."

Scholarships worth Rs 1 million were to be distributed. To participate in
the program, students were required to develop a piece of "high quality open
source software". The projects submitted to the Red Hat scholarships were
expected to have effort contribution similar to that of a typical final year
BE/BTech project.

On the panel as the advisory board for the Red Hat Scholarships were Dr. D.
B. Phatak founder of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at
IIT Bombay; Prof.S Sadagopan, Director of the Indian Institute of
Information Technology, Bangalore; Rajesh Jain, Director of Netcore
Solutions; Sandeep Menon, IBM India; and S Ramakrishnan, M.D. CDAC. This was
open to students of the B.Tech, MCA, M.Sc and M Tech level.

"The objective of the Red Hat scholarships is to speed up the adoption of
open source software in India and make India a proud contributor to the
global open source community," said Red Hat.

Priority areas it focussed on included: 1. Linux localization for Indian
languages 2. Development of open source Enterprise Application Integration
(EAI) frameworks 3. Meaningful applications for Small and Medium Enterprises
e.g. MiniERP, accounting and microcredit applications 4. Geographical
Information Systems 5. Embedded Linux and associated applications for Net
appliances e.g. smart cards, cell phones, handled PDAs, general appliances
etc. 6. Audio/video applications like VoIP, Internet telephony, feature
recognition, text-to-speech etc. 7. Network related e.g. protocols, security
etc. 8. System software and tools. e.g. Linux extensions, open source
databases, and their functionality extensions, software development
environments.

Participants were instructed to create their own projects on Sourceforge
(www.sourceforge.net) or join existing FOSS projects. Software was to be
evaluated on the basis of (i) Quality of the project proposal submitted to
Red Hat Scholarships (ii) Overall value of the project to the open source
community in India and abroad (iii) Innovativeness of the software
developed and (iv) Quality of code, documentation etc.

Red Hat promised online support to the contestants, and also a download
site for tools and software programs. It was open to "bonafide students" of
a college located in India.

http://www.in.redhat.com/community/rhscholarship.php

Sarovar.org
-----------

Sarovar.org describes itself as India's first portal to host projects under
Free/Open source licenses. It is located in Trivandrum, South India and is
customised, installed and maintained by Linuxense as part of their community
services and sponsored by River Valley Technologies.

Site documentation is at http://doc.sarovar.org

At the time of writing (July 2005), it had a total of 303 hosted projects,
and some 1,955 registered users. Some of the most downloaded projects were

PSTricks Tutorial (97,354 downloads), LaTeX Primer (16,508), PDFscreen
(13,933), PDFslide (9,992), PDFtricks (9,912), Draft Copy for PDFTeX
(5,335), LuitLinux - a bootable Live CD distro (5,151), JavaDBF (5,119),
TeXLive (3,545), and Swathantra Malayalam Computing (2,418). While some of
the interest in downloading may reflect the TeX orientation of key
individuals involved, the interest in Malayalam computing (the regional
language of Kerala) is also noteworthy.

While there are diverse global names among the "most active" techies in the
first week of July 2005, there are also Asian names visible among the top
ten -- including The Thanh Han, Anil Kumar K., Suresh VP, E Krishnan and
Kaveh Bazargan.

July 7, 2005