Highlights of OSI 2014

Open source has been around for quite some time in the past. Businesses have been skeptical of adopting open source solutions due to concerns about safety, perceived a lack of support and simply because that wasn’t the way things were done. But these days, open source solutions are becoming increasingly popular as decision makers realize that they stack up strongly, if not better than their proprietary counterparts and often cost considerably less if anything at all.

As an ode to open source movement, many conventions around the world are held to engage the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) enthusiasts. The largest of the Asian convention was held recently in Bangalore for the 11th time and I had an opportunity to be a part of this congregation, for the first time.

I was very excited to experience how Microsoft has been using Apache Cordova in native web apps. So I volunteered to test it. I was supposed to download a Github project 2048, a very popular single player puzzle game created in early 2014 by a teenage Italian developer called Gabriele Cirulli. The objective was to identify the CSS and script files and use them efficiently in my own project.

I used an Open Source mobile environment emulator called Ripple Emulator plugin provided by chrome to simulate the game on various devices. I was able to achieve the objectives given. The team panel requested me to speak about my experience in using Cordova and I talked about how wonderful the experience was to test multi hybrid apps using Cordova with HTML and javascript. How effortless it was to create apps for all platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian) now with Cordova.

Let me share what Open Source India (OSI) is.

Started as Linux Asia in 2004, OSI has been at the helm of bringing together the FOSS community and the industry together. The 11th edition this year aimed to focus on Open Source Ecosystem in Asia, specifically, in India.

This two-day conference was a well-organized and a well-attended one. It had participation from exhibitors like MongoDb, Microsoft, HP, Zimbra, MySql, and many more who were showcasing the products that were developed specifically for open source community.

The first day’s session had a keynote address by Rajiv Pandey about “A deployment architecture for open stack in the enterprise”. He is the Distinguished Technologist for HP cloud.

OpenStack is a free and open-source software cloud computing software platform. Users primarily deploy it as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. OpenStack.org releases it under the terms of the Apache License.

Shrinivasan T, the coordinator for IIugc shared his views on how Wikipedia is playing a vital role in sharing knowledge and the need for us to actively engage with it next.

On the second day, the crowd was a tad thinner but spirit & enthusiasm in those present was unmistakable.

The software landscape has come a full circle with proprietary protagonists like Microsoft slowly embracing open source, evidenced by their MS Open Tech, that drives a wide range of projects to enable the use of open standards and open source on Microsoft platforms. The latest development being its initiative to make its long cherished. NET framework open source.

So, it was especially interesting to listen to Jose Miguel Parrella, the Open Source CTO in Microsoft’s marketing & operations team who spoke about “How we innovate in a big world full of things”. He mentioned how it was still a controversial topic that a proprietary giant like Microsoft has stepped into the open source world to contribute significantly.

Open source is powering innumerable startups in developing innovative solutions that are revolutionizing the tech world. I learned from the conference the scope of Open source and how it has come out of niche segment and is here to stay, indeed.