Hall of Fame
Initiatives and positive steps taken by individuals or organizations to spread Free Software in India.
[ If you want to add entries here, please follow guidelines at the end of the page]
Heroes/heroines:
Terence Monteiro of DeepRoot Linux developed Open Document version of Income Tax return form while Income Tax Department of India has provided only MS Excel based forms. More details: http://freedom-matters.in/
Kerala Taxes moved completely to online filing of taxes. To help business owners to efile their taxes, the sales tax department had prepared and released a Microsoft Excel template file(.xls) to be used by the dealers to generate files for filing taxes online. Zyxware, realized that this would effectively force Free Software Users into using Microsoft Office for filing their taxes and took effort into converting this template into OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Format(.ods). More details : http://www.zyxware.com/articles/2009/01/16/openoffice-spreadsheet-template-for-filing-kvat-returns-ported-by-zyxware
zyxware technologies introduced "freedom toaster" a Free Software CD/DVD vending machine that will make a copy any Free Software that the user wants on a CD or DVD. Such a dispensing mechanism is highly relevant in a country like India where cheap and unlimited broadband internet which remains the chief means of free software distribution, is not very prevalent. http://www.zyxware.com/articles/2008/09/01/zyxware-announces-launch-of-indias-first-freedom-toaster
Harsh Kumar of BharatBhasha who created and gave away fonts like ShuSha (Hindi), Shivaji (Marathi), Vakil (Gujarati) freely at a time (1997) when Indian language fonts were prohibitively expensive. This was well before the FOSS movement started in India so these fonts are not in a FOSS compliant license but I (Venky) think that he richly deserves recognition for his pioneering work in popularising computing in Indian languages.
Narendra Sisodiya, moderator of LUG@IIT Delhi and currently working at Society for Knowledge Commons, Delhi has done pioneering work in the field of FOSS evangelism. His contributions include FOSS Jobs portal http://fossjobs.in and his efforts in creating a user friendly Linux distribution named School OS. He has hosted 6 episodes of a FOSS based discussions on GyanDarshan-1 National Television Channel for school kids. He is also associated with OLPC India. He was successful to convince NCERT to move their audio/video format from mp3/mpeg to ogg format. A huge number of video will be available under Ogg foramt. Work in progress include books for FOSS based curriculum for CBSE , Learn C++ under Linux, e-learning platform EduVid, WikiPress
LINUX For You magazine, that's been sharing knowledge about Linux & FOSS in India, and in SAARC nations plus S'pore and Malaysia. Now through their web-portals--www.linuxforu.com and through the Facebook page of LFY (29000+ fans by end of May 2010)--an attempt is being made to promote FOSS amongst a global audience. Recently, the team also launched fossyellowpages.com to showcase to CIOs and IT Managers (the end customers) that there are many firms providing support for Linux and FOSS, and that FOSS is now business-ready.
Guidelines:
- The person/organization should have contributed to the adoption and awareness of FOSS in India by creating and/or enhancing a product that makes FOSS adoption less painfull for citizens of India.
- Entries must be accompanied by name and URL of the project mentioned and URL of prominent contributors if available.
- FOSSCOMM Mailing list will have a discussion on the entries. If you want to add an entry to this, please consider posting it in fosscomm mailing list.