Status Of Open Source In India

Alolita Sharma has written an article on FossBazaar on the status of Open Source in India. After talking about various government initiatives and how companies are leveraging into open source for their internal needs, she offers an optimistic outlook for the growth of Open Source in India.

One of my peeves about India is the lack of active participation in the Open Source projects by geeks in India. It is in fact a disturbing trend that India is not in the forefront of Open Source movement in spite of being the leading supplier of world's IT needs. Ms. Sharma explains how it can change in the future and offers an optimistic prediction on it.

While most open source software is still used internally in Indian organizations, the potential for significant contributions back to global open source projects is increasing. Growth in contributions may accelerate when the need to scratch an itch (or many itches) to support local needs grows. As scalable and affordable automation using open technologies becomes embedded in the processes of managing and supporting the needs of more than a billion people, useful and significant contributions from India will begin to pour into the global commons of open source software.

Well, we will wait and see how it turns out. Good luck and kudos to the evangelists in India.

Technorati Tags: open source, free software, opensource, India

News Highlight: GlassFish As A LAMP Alternative For Enterprises

Sun Microsystems today announced GlassFish Portfolio as an enterprise level web application platform. Sun calls it most complete, cost-efficient open web application platform. It is a stack comprising of its highly scalable, high availability, GlassFish server, Apache Tomcat, Ruby, PHP and Liferay Portal. Similar to many other commercial open source stack, it is a pre-integrated, fully tested stack ready for deployment in production systems.

The GlassFish Portfolio includes the GlassFish Application Server, along with the following new components:

• Sun GlassFish Web Stack - A complete and fully integrated LAMP stack designed for developers wanting a light-weight Web solution. The GlassFish Web Stack includes Tomcat, Memcached, Squid and Lighttpd with support for PHP, Ruby and the Java Platform.
• Sun GlassFish Web Space Server - Based on Liferay Portal, the leading open source portal technology, helps companies simplify Web site development and build collaborative work spaces, including portals and social networking sites.
• Sun GlassFish ESB - A lightweight, open source ESB platform for department-scale and enterprise SOA deployments that connects existing and new applications to deliver content and services to the Web.
• Sun Enterprise Manager - For enterprise scale management and monitoring of the GlassFish Portfolio including SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support.

With the release of this stack, Sun could complement its Mysql Enterprise Database, offering enterprises a complete portfolio of applications needed for their web deployment. It is available in a range of subscription based pricing starting with $999 per server per year to $8999 per server per year. More information on their subscriptions plans is available here.

News Highlight is a section where I will highlight the latest news related to Open Source, Open Standards, Open Web, etc., without much analysis on my part.

Technorati Tags: opensource, open source, glassfish, lamp, enterprise, sun microsystems, sun

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Welcome to Open @ Krishworld

Welcome to this new blog at Krishworld. In this blog, I will be writing about my thoughts on topics related to open source, open standards, open web, open society, open government, etc.. My thoughts on these topics are evolutionary in nature and I plan to use this platform to fine tune my thoughts. Feel free to join the discussion here. Initially, I may not maintain a regular schedule but eventually, I plan to move into a routine. Feel free to visit my homepage at www.krishworld.com for more information about me.

I used to blog about open source and related topic in my old blog, which is now archived at blog.krishworld.com. I was somewhat regular on that blog till a sudden boredom and eventual obligations at other blogs pushed it to near death. Then I moved it to wordpress.com, breaking many of my links. I have decided to retire that blog and start fresh, exclusively, on topics related to open source, open standards, open web, etc.. In short, this blog will serve as a platform to evolve my ideas for an open world. However, I might recycle some of the posts from the old blog if it is relevant to the theme here.

If anyone has a question about hosting my blog on an open world in a proprietary environment like blogger, here is my response. I want to host this blog on the clouds. I am clear about it and I don't believe in using traditional hosting methods while preaching the advantages of clouds elsewhere. The only option for an open source based blog hosting on the clouds is wordpress.com. But I find its features restrictive and themes terrible. Plus, as we move from the traditional software world to cloud computing world, open source becomes one of the many considerations. Others being open standards and data portability. Since I could export the blogs into an xml file and the availability of open source blog converters, blogger.com meets some of the standards I have set forth for myself. I do agree that it is not a solid reason but I find the limitations of wordpress.com equally restrictive. In future, I might move the blog to a cloud based hosting that also offers their software in an opensource format. Till then, this is going to serve as a platform to develop my ideas.

Once again, welcome to Open@Krishworld and I hope you find my musings worthwhile.