dear mohit: i agree that AICTE and other teams are generally happy with proprietary software, and more often than not FOSS is not acknowledged. However, there are a few trying to bring the FOSS culture (Dr. Sivakumar, Dr. Phatak, Dr. Prabhu Ramachandran, etc. of IIT Mumbai, Dr. Om Vikas and Dr. Manoj Gaur of MNNIT Jaipur, etc., to name a few).
when we were introducing FOSS in the Anna University curriculum, and pitching for FOSS equivalents to be listed for lab courses, the VC asked a simple question : can you assure me that the software you suggest has been tested to meet the requirements and relevant lab manuals prepared, can it be installed & worked on comfortably, will there be support for training the staff to handle these software ... Of course, this was 4-5 years back and things have changed tremendously, but much more need to be done. Please remember : a college chairman will be happy to ANNOUNCE that they are spending 10 crores on software and not 10 lakhs. [My colleagues at NRCFOSS were told by a management that they can afford the cost!!!]. Our take should be more on knowledge/learning/practice, rather than cost. Even stuff like licensing, piracy won't work given the "ethical" scenario, but virus may be a good point to talk about. A number of colleges use FOSS alternatives in the lab. You yourself have managed to introduced FOSS in the UP Tech computer lab (how is it going? do the lecturers need support?). A set of distros have been released (and some work is still on) with FOSS equivalents running on linux platform for lab. At NRCFOSS we got a group of students & staff to run EIE, ECE, ELE experiments for B.E to run using Scilab & Octave, instead of Matlab -- and a sort of manual is ready (which i have been sharing with many). However, all these efforts are distributed and sporadic. Instead of claiming that proprietary should be REPLACED with FOSS, we can be more successful if both are listed in the curriculum, to start with. We also need to gather the info about the FOSS usage in labs in a more cohesive manner, and take up the issue in various fora. An exercise we plan to take for next release of BOSS is to gather the various engg & egov software and test them to run on BOSS. We could also use the NRCFOSS/BOSS websites to highlight the FOSS alternatives -- the is outdated as of now and is being revamped ; i would also like to provide links to other sites, especially in India where the software & support persons are available. Am looking forward to more interactions and will update the list with some of the action steps being planned. I also welcome comments/suggestions. [CDAC Chennai is moving into a new building and the NRCFOSS/BOSS portals are down for the time being. Will alert you all as soon as they are up]. Please excuse me for the long msg. Will try to come up with short msgs with specific steps. thanks, srinivasan. Dr. S. Srinivasan Project Scientist NRCFOSS @ CDAC - Chennai email: [email protected] [email protected] cell: 94443 02439 _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
