Open Source India Conference,Chennai,2010

A year of preparation & planning, fighting & execution, and the long wait is to bear fruit finally.The Open Source India Conference, 2010(formerly LinuxAsia) will be unveiled at Trade Center,Chennai on 19th September,2010. A path-breaking movement for Open Source in India started in 2003, and with the mission to accelerate the growth of adoption of Open Source in Asia. Till date, the overall mission of Open Source India remains same. A key attribute of Open Source India is that it tries to bridge the gap between the 'community' and the 'industry'

OSI Days is the crossroads of all things open source, bringing together 3000+ of the best, brightest, and most interesting people to explore what's new, and to champion the cause of open principles and open source adoption

Official Website : http://osidays.com/

Registrations     : http://osidays.com/register-now

Speakers          : http://osidays.com/speakers

Sessions           : http://osidays.com/sessions

The various highlights of the conference:

• Meet the experts of PHP, Open Source Databases, Apache, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails
• See the best of breed technologies of Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Parallelism for Open Source World
• Meet decision makers, CXO level Open Source champions, students and Government Official
• Use open source to target Android, iPhone and other mobile platforms
• Learn Open Source Business Models, Legal Issues and marketing strategies
• Participate in FOSS India Awards, 2010.

At OSI Days you can choose to attend from multiple tracks around open source technologies and platforms, attend best of breed tutorials/ workshops, network with who is who of open source world and a chance to see a great city Chennai and India! The proposed tracks of event are:

• Mobile(App Development, Game Development, Android, iPhone, Symbian & Others)
• IT Managers / Business(Legal, Community Management, Best Practices, Marketing Strategies, Open Web / Standardization, & Business Models)
• Cloud Computing(Tools and Platforms, Cloudnomics, Cloud for Dummies & Others)
• Government(Applications, eGovernance, Case Study, & Legal)
• Hardware(Infrastructure Management, Security, Semi Embedded Devices, Parallelization, Grid, Multi Core, Multi Threading, Virtualization & Others)
• PHP(PHP 5 & 6, PHP Security, Frameworks, Architecture / QA, & Best Practices)
• Ruby on Rails(Drupal:Best Practices, Module Development, Theme Development, Scaling/ Management/ Performance & Others)
• Databases(MySQL, NoSQL, CouchDB, PostgreSQL, Ingres, SQLite & Others)
• Developer / Tools & Techniques

OSI Days is organized by the 'Forum for Open Source Initiative in India' (FOSII)', in association with LINUX For You magazine, and powered by the EFY Group of publications.

Ubuntu Community does it again with 'Unity'

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, La Hulpe, Belgium, May 10, 2010 has been host to a couple of major happenings in the linux developer world - Unveiling of Canonical's Desktop Environment codenamed 'Unity'  and also a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios(It can install vis-a-vis Windows and present as an option to boot). The new slew of product versions is clearly aimed at gaining upperhand in domain of netbooks and related 'touch-based' devices.It has been announced that 'Unity will be the desktop environment for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition onwards, released in October 2010, and is available to developers building applications for the netbook environment.'

In parallel to this, Canonical announced 'Ubuntu Light'.This cut-down version of Ubuntu features IM, browser (esp for Social Networks) and media player applications and is aimed at PC manufacturers seeking an 'instant-web' experience that complements Windows on consumer PCs.This has the greatest feature that it connects to web within 10 seconds of booting, with a running browser and a Media Player interface that integrates with Windows Clearly for Ubuntu, it is a new market segment which will witness much impetus in the near future.

Canonical had made available the Netbook Edition and Remix editions here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

https://launchpad.net/~canonical-dx-team/+archive/une

Screenshots :

http://www.canonical.com/products/unity

With this release, Canonical has achieved yet another feat : evoke competition in the Netbook segmant with mac by presenting a mac-like experience and to bridge a gap between a pure OS and a Netbook UI. Unity is clearly optimized for netbooks, featuring a dock on the left side of the screen (as evident from screenshots)from which you can launch applications and browse your computer's file system. In addition, the title bars of windows will be on the menu bar instead of on the window itself, Mac OS X-style. These types of tweaks are designed to maximize vertical space for browsing, in a world where widescreen monitors are the new norm (especially on netbooks).

To sum up, we can quote the words of Marc Shuttleworth of Canonical on the new experience:

"Unity is a new canvas for the collective Ubuntu imagination to paint on. It has proven a perfect base for Ubuntu Light, and the roadmap ahead promises to make Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition a landmark release."

Its time to ditch the FAT

Microsoft has been recently in news as new evangelists of open world, expressing affinity to openness and encouraging critics to give it a respite from cloud of doubts about its true intentions. But as someone has quoted, "Always the real Satan comes out from a veiled angel".When it comes to market and products, it again proves that it can't be trusted and is not willing to support truly open technologies.

The limelight has again fallen on it as a dispute with a reputed navigation device manufacturer in US called 'TomTom'.The conflict between Microsoft and TomTom raised serious concerns within the open source software community. Microsoft alleged that TomTom's navigation products, using the open source Linux kernel, infringe on Microsoft's patents (:p). The patents cited by Microsoft include compatibility features in Microsoft's FAT filesystem, support for which is implemented in Linux. Fears were raised that the lawsuit was the beginning of another patent campaign by Microsoft against embedded Linux community.

TomTom responded to Microsoft's lawsuit earlier this month using a countersuit that Microsoft had infringed some of its navigation patents. As conflict escalated, TomTom joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization that has accumulated a defensive patent portfolio for protecting Linux from patent infringement lawsuits. It was also speculated the the larger Open Source / linux community would assemble for defense of their embedded developer brothers which has been averted for now by the settlement agreement between Microsoft and TomTom by which TomTom would pay for any infringement from its side.

But the real story of this is that microsoft has suffered in both ends, in the larger embedded product market and also in the IPR world. The deal would mean that Tom Tom would remove the functionality that is covered under the FAT patents. This will guarantee that the code in TomTom's Linux kernel can continue to be broadly redistributed downstream without patent redtape and without support of Microsoft, but having broad spectrum support from Linux Community.Another thing is that the Software giant would suffer further setbacks from Upstream kernel developers as they could potentially adopt TomTom's code changes in order to avoid future patent disputes with Microsoft over FAT.

The linux community has also come into the scene with a prominent stand:

" It has even gone to extent of announcing new kernel patches to work around Microsoft FAT patents according to this story:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21766/Linux_Kernel_Patch_Works_Around_Microsoft_s_FAT_Patents

" In the larger Storage and Clustered filesystems front, new alliances like "Open Cloud Manifesto" have sprung up with support of IBM to explore possibilities in
building interoperable open solutions towards open storage filesystems.

" And lately,open source big brothers are now keeping a close watch on the embedded and mobile development scenario against any such misadventure by large
monopolies.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin is the most vocal in his observation over this matter.He suggests that product makers should consider the possibility of rejecting Microsoft's legacy FAT filesystem and should instead adopt an unencumbered open source alternative.We can quote him as below:

"The technology at the heart of this settlement is the FAT filesystem. As acknowledged by Microsoft in the press release, this file system is easily replaced with multiple technology alternatives. The Linux Foundation is here to assist interested parties in the technical coordination of removing the FAT filesystem from products that make use of it today," he wrote. "Microsoft does not appear to be a leopard capable of changing its spots. Maybe it's time developers go on a diet from Microsoft and get the FAT out of their products."