Ahmedabad to host open source meet

In what is a pioneering step towards initiating greater use of open source software (OSS) in the country in the place of proprietary software, top OSS players like IBM, AMD, Red Hat India and Deeproot Linux have decided to join hands in hosting a national conference on OSS in Ahmedabad for the first time in India.

Apart from addresses by several top OSS officials in the country, the conference will hold a two-day live demonstration-cum-training sessions on OSS' benefits as opposed to proprietary software.

Chaired by B H Jajoo from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A), the meet will see the presence of B K Gairola, Director General, National Informatics Center, Stephen Braim, VP, Government Programmes, IBM Asia Pacific, Jay Hiremath, GM, AMD, G Nagarjuna, President, Free Software Foundation of Inda among others.

"Open source software solutions as a user tool and business proposition is not yet a popular concept in India. Reports and surveys have already captured the growing trend of servers and applications being run increasingly on open source platforms. However, it is important to bring it to the common man's desktop which is the reason behind the conference," said Chirag Mehta, CEO, Icenet and Chairman of the ICT committee of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) which is organising the event.

The conference will look to target SMEs, academicians and IT professionals.

"From the affordability aspect, it is not easy for SMEs to come out with Rs 5 lakh for an ERP solution. Through open source software, one gets much better security than propreproprietaryietary software and one can even modify the coding to suit their needs," said B H Jajoo.

The conference will see participation from Ahmedabad Computer Merchants Association (ACMA), Computer Society of India (CSI) and Gujarat Electronics and Software Industries Association (GESIA).

The event would be followed by a BPO summit at the end of July in Ahmedabad which will be organised with the support of Gujarat Informatics Ltd (GIL), Department of Science and Technology, CII and KPMG.