Tech jamboree: India has the largest community of open source developers but large businesses are still wary of free software

Atul Chitnis

24 NOVEMBER, 10.30 A.M.
National Science Seminar Complex, Bangalore

It is already 30 minutes past the scheduled start, but there are few signs of any activity on stage for the sixth edition of India's largest free and open source symposium, foss.in. While the gates were opened at 8 a.m., veterans of the event seem to have read the situation perfectly, sauntering in 10 minutes before the scheduled start and forming a winding queue that extends all the way to the busy C.V. Raman Road outside. Inside the 950-seater auditorium, delegates are just beginning to find their places and firing up their laptops to take notes on the fly and tweak their presentations in the last minute. Six years after the event was first held in Bangalore, little seems to have changed about the look-and-feel of foss.in. Attendees are almost exclusively open source and free software code-jocks and unlike dozens of other academic and business conferences hosted at this centre, there's an air of informality around this one.

"We are for, of and by the open source community," Atul Chitnis, the man behind this event and the founder of Exocore Consulting, a Bangalore-based open source solutions vendor, says in his opening remarks, when the event finally gets rolling, nearly an hour behind schedule. As always, there are sharp jibes at enemy #1 Microsoft (revolving around their platforms and software such as .Net and Windows), but despite the growth of open source in India (with even state administrations such as Kerala plumping for it), there are few signs that the scope of this event has changed. The keynote address, this time around by Suparna Bhattacharya, from IBM India, is packed with some 30 slides of tech jargon and has end-users and the plain curious fleeing for the exits. "Keynotes need to be more broad based and thematic," one such attendee tells this writer as he seeks refuge at the snacks stall.

Chitnis argues that "having a recognised and respected Indian developer (Suparna Bhattacharya) doing the opening keynote to a standing ovation, and the subsequent positive reactions, was a massive achievement". He claims that as a result of this re-orientation, many new projects have been started and more people are showing interest in the free software movement. The interest from a techie's standpoint is evident from the line of white tent just behind the main auditorium, where people set up on-the-spot discussion boards and projects.

Enemy #1: It's Microsoft for them

General users of Linux and other open source offerings are, however, clearly aggrieved with the schedule offering attendees a technology-intensive programme, filled with sessions on Linux and Art of Minimalist Development by IBM's Bhattacharya, Using Gentoo Portage to Build a Sandboxed Application Stack and complete geek-speak talks on The TFRC Tunnel Protocol-an XFRM-based tunnel driver for Linux 2.6. "There are numerous other events around India all year round (for example, Freedel in Delhi or Gnunify in Pune) and user groups that already cater to newcomers and advocacy," contends Chitnis.

In between this blizzard of technology talks, there are actually some more generic presentations on bridging the digital divide using free software and more expectedly a vitriolic attack on the existing model by Christoff Wittig, founder and CEO of db4 objects, who attacks the current model for "stifling innovation" and arguing that well-oiled open source projects can actually earn money. Over the last few months, state governments, most notably Kerala, have made a very public pitch for open source software products, at the expense of Microsoft.

This engineering student has put an operating system on a pen drive Anil Gulecha, a student at the JSS Academy	"India offers us the largest communities of open-source proficient techies" Gajanana Hegde VP, SpikeSource

The intense technology focus, however, takes its toll on the total number of participants (down to 2,000 compared to over 3,000 a year ago) as well as the range of participants for this event. "This was intentional-we refocussed the event to increase both the quality of talks and the interaction between people at the event," says Chitnis. The event is an ideal platform for some companies such as Sun Microsystems and SpikeSource to advertise their products. "We believe that India offers us one of the largest communities of open-source proficient techies globally," says SpikeSource's Vice President Gajanana Hegde. Others such as Anil Gulecha, a third year engineering student at the JSS Academy, Bangalore, also use this opportunity to show off the BeleniX operating system on a thumb drive. "You can now download the entire BeleniX OS onto your thumb drive and use it anywhere," says Gulecha about his first open source project.

Free world: Die-hard open source believers schmooze

Rather than target large companies with Linux and other open source software (and application based on it), SpikeSource's Hegde says that small businesses are adopting Linux and Linux-based solutions because they no longer have to pay for the hefty licence fee Microsoft demands. "This is a good carrot for them to save some costs... When you are 50-100 people, you don't want to spend your whole budget just on it," he argues. Aside from being unable to afford expensive licence fees, using Linux and other open source technologies means that there's a much larger pool of technical help at hand if a bug had to be fixed. "Most of these companies can't afford to spend on large teams for support and maintenance, but open source communities can be approached anywhere to fix a bug," says Hegde.

While large corporates are already locked into dominant closed offerings from the likes of Microsoft, open source votaries argue that the booming 2.5 lakh strong SMB market may just hold the key to the Indian market. "The small and medium business (SMB) segment registered a strong double-digit growth in pc shipments," says Piyush Pushkal, Assistant Manager, pc Research IDC India.

While Bangalore became a beehive of open source activity for three days in late October, it remains to be seen if Chitnis & Co. can persuade computer users to dump Microsoft for open source.