Mobility, web services, and kernel development: open source innovations at the FOSS.in conference

The FOSS.in conference, since its 2001 launch, has been scaling up to tap into some of the best tech presentations from across the globe, as also the growing Indian digirati scattered worldwide. Sirtaj Singh Kang, who is of Indian origin and now based in Australia, is back to FOSS.in for the sixth time. Commented corporate computing strategist Atul Chitnis, “He is the closest we have in India to having a FOSS superstar…” The initials FOSS stand for “Free and Open Source Software.”

Sirtaj is scheduled to speak on “Writing an SMS Service with Free Software”. He told LinuxWorld.com: “Why is it easy? The software stack is all there — Kannel takes care of the hard work, and can talk to most mobile phones via USB or serial, or to an SMS aggregator via a variety of protocols, freeing the developer to work on application logic using well-known Web protocols.”

In a resource-poor talent-rich part of the world, he argues that creating a simple personal SMS service can be done with a computer and a mobile handset costing around Rs 2000 ($ 40) with a data cable.

He explains its particular relevance to the majority world: “In developed countries, most people are using the Internet for many of the things that Indians use SMS for. But here mobiles are about as affordable and more accessible than land lines and the Internet. Carriers are providing a lot of value-added SMS services due to the popularity of SMS and the comfort that people have with the interface. As a result, raw and per-subscriber SMS traffic goes up every year.”

One year back, Kang was approached by start-up Sapphire Mobile Systems to lead development of an SMS-driven mobile payments service. “I like working on the kinds of products and service that I would use myself, so I jumped at the chance. We are looking to launch our service in the U.S. early next year. But India is a very likely market for us down the track. We are using a lot of FOSS tools internally, and are thrilled with them,” he said.

Emerging from India’a software capital Bangalore, this isn’t just another FOSS conference. Six years old already, FOSS.in (earlier known as Linux-Bangalore) is breaking barriers to emerge as an excellent global showcase of technology. With topics ranging from Web development, to messaging libraries, SMS services, the GPL3 draft, kernel hacking and more, it’s drawing growing attention and some surprise that an event of this nature comes with a ‘Made In India’ tag.

Other speakers at the Nov 24-26 event include German netfilter/iptables hacker Harald Welte, known for his kernel work and for leading the gpl-violations.org project to enforce the GNU GPL. There’s also kernel ‘top 10’ committer Christoph Hellwig, KDE developer Aaron Seigo, Java-Gnome maintainer Andrew Cowie, OpenSolaris’ Peter Karlsson, PHP’s Rasmus Lerdorf, and Tim “Blinkenlights” Pritlove of the Chaos Computer Club. Brazil’s LinuxChix networker Sulamita Garcia will be there again.

Luke Kanies, author of the server automation tool Puppet, announced via his blog: “I’ll be presenting Puppet once again, but to an international audience for the first time and with a greater focus on how people can contribute….” The FOSS.in participants list is filled with employees of the IBMs, the Novells, the Suns, the Yahoos, the Googles, the HPs… often from India itself, and mostly from Bangalore, the software centre of this country of 1.1 billion.

Gopalarathnam Venkatesan works as a technical lead for front-end applications at Yahoo, Bangalore and his work involves writing PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the most part, and writing shell procedures occasionally “to help myself not doing repetitive stuff and also because it interests me.”

Venkatesan is scheduled to talk about the history of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), its structure, why it can be used as a lightweight data interchange method, the use of JSON in AJAX, advantages like cross-domain XMLHTTP requests, and what are the short comings of it and a proposal for fixing the same. He will also compare JSON and XML, validating JSON (since JSON is almost a subset of YAML) and who uses JSON?

“While YAML has been mostly used by Ruby/Python developers, JSON is embraced by web application developers. This is because JSON is a subset of JavaScript and hence it is very natural to the language that is the default scripting language of the Web browsers. On the other hand, YAML is not a subset of JavaScript and hence YAML cannot be used easily as a light-weight data interchange alternative to XML though there are JavaScript libraries for parsing YAML,” Venkatesan said.

In his view, with the next version of JavaScript (ECMAScript 4th Edition, shortly E4X), the choice becomes either JSON or XML because both become a language construct. “The only argument that stands in favor of JSON here is the support for older browsers (that don’t understand E4X) since the E4X constructs would even throw a syntax error. But things might change in couple of years when E4X is supported by all Grade-A browsers it would have a larger audience to embrace it,” Venkatesan adds.

He notes that there are interesting discussions on the YAML-core mailing list about relaxing the YAML specification a little bit (actually making two small changes to the specification) to make it a superset of JSON. JSON, he notes, has its own RFC – RFC 4627.

Ashwin Chaugule is scheduled to speak on the state of Wi-Fi in the GNU/Linux network subsystems. “Starting from the basics of Wi-Fi, I cover the details of generic Wi-Fi stacks and their integration with low level device drivers and high level networking layer. I will also touch the intricacies of the two stacks, to signify their differences,” he told LinuxWorld.com. “There aren’t many Indians who talk on Wi-Fi at such events like Foss. In fact I haven’t seen any such talk in the past two years.”

Chaugule is optimistic about the Linux wireless driver situation, thanks to work by wireless-dev tree maintainer John Linville. “His tree contains drivers ported to both Intel and Dscape stacks, and the changes in the respective stacks too. People are actively working towards finalizing one stack for Linus’s kernel tree. Unlike earlier, they’re working collaboratively towards making the Wi-Fi subsystem perform as efficiently as possible. Currently Wi-Fi devices look like Ethernet devices to the kernel and the conversion (802.3 to 802.11 and vice versa) happens in the Wi-Fi stack. Categorizing Wi-Fi separately is being discussed quite intensely on the mailing lists,” he says.

Organizers introduced some prominent speakers. Suparna Bhattacharya, who gives the inaugural keynote this Friday morning, is one of India’s most respected Linux kernel developers. Chitnis, whose mother is German, said not without a touch of pride: “(Bhattacharya) is an Indian, working in India, contributing to the FOSS world. She is everything FOSS.IN stands for, and we are proud to have her giving the opening keynote address of FOSS.IN/2006. No one on earth is better qualified. When she stands up to give her talk, remember that not only is she everything that FOSS.IN wants to achieve (FOSS contributors from India), but that by standing there, she proves that it can be done.”

To understand the growth of open source in India, one has to look at its shaky, largely unnoticed and mostly grassroots-up growth. Today, the government of India’s Ministry of Communications and IT is the principal sponsor of this event. But much of India’s free software growth has happened with little or no government support or involvement. Co-founder of the Linux-India network Sudhakar “Thaths” Chandra coordinates a panel discussion on “Ten years of Linux In India” during the Nov 24-26, 2006 event. In that interesting period, “Thaths” himself transitioned from working with Netscape in the United States to being with Google in India, and even volunteered a year of his tech skills at Holy Rosary College in Kenya through UK-based Voluntary Service Overseas

The movement has seen its ups and downs, mostly ups though. As Intel’s “open source diva” Danese Cooper put it in her blog, “The FOSS scene in India is fascinating…more than in any market, India is the front lines of battle between software self-determinism and software vendor lock-in.” Today, that’s a thought that is getting recognition. This event itself is held at the Indian Institute of Sciences, a center promoted by a 19th century industrialist and now one of the country’s top research institutions with more than 2,000 active researchers working in 48 specialized departments. In 2005, this research center got a grant of a billion rupees ($25 million) from the Indian government, which is still big money by Indian standards.

One problem with FOSS in India is its lack of visibility. This sector gets hardly written about. Most developers are just geek-focused, the mainstream press finds it difficult to cut through the jargon, and the tech press is still largely focused on spreading pure how-to content. As a result, most here hardly notice the contribution being made by India. Most even doubt its existence. Some visibility is coming now though, barely a decade after this talent pool connected up with the world via all-crucial Internet access that came only in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Sirtaj Singh Kang explains the growth of FOSS in India, after visiting for six years. “At the first LB (Linux Bangalore event six years ago), it felt like contributors like me were some sort of strange alien beings that students and other attendees really had trouble connecting with on a conceptual level — ‘Who are these guys who write software and give it away? Why on earth would they do such a thing?’ Every year though, the level of connection with the idea of FOSS and its contributors becomes higher, never mind the software itself. The difference is showing in the number of Indian names appearing amongst the developers and contributors to all sorts of FOSS projects,” he says.

There are other positive signs too. Skill has gone up, understanding of FOSS has gone up, and most importantly, self-confidence has gone up, according to Kang. “It’s OK for us Indian programmers and IT workers to now believe that we are capable of producing the best work in the world. Until recently though, a lack of self-confidence would have made that statement sound very odd,” he adds. Kang argues that “companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google are based overseas, but FOSS gives Indian geeks a chance to escape the idea that the best software comes from elsewhere.” He believes FOSS.IN’s mixture of local and overseas speakers has made and continues to make a small but important difference in that regard.

Ubuntu developer Baishampayan ‘Bhaskar’ Ghosh points to some colleagues, such as Suparna Bhattacharya. “She is one of the very, very few (women) kernel hackers in the world, and a very unassuming person,” Ghosh says. Gopal V (is leader of DotGNU and PHP APC projects). Rahul Sundaram works on Fedora and OLPC, while Guntupalli Karunakar is the main inspiring force behind the IndLinux effort to localize GNU/Linux into South Asian Langauges. “There are some student hackers who show promise, like Anant Narayanan (NIT Jaipur) and Prashanth Mohan of Anna University,” Ghosh adds.

Ghosh is involved with the Debian and Ubuntu projects as a maintainer and developer, as also with IndLinux and the Ankur Bangla projects. (The latter is an inspiring Bangladesh-India attempt to find solutions for the commonly used Bengali language.) He is a maintainer of the Free Bangla Fonts project and a member of FSF-India working committee. As if this was not enough, he’s Web master of gnu.org and does “some Python hacking here and there, nothing substantial.” He was also a Google Summer of Code 2006 participant.

Slowly, the cycle of inspiration is growing.

Prashanth Mohan, who speaks on the LDTP at FOSS.in, says: “I found a good mentor in one of my college seniors (Sridhar Ratna) who initiated me into the world of Linux. We used to spend long nights quarreling online about the merits and demerits of the bazaar model.” He got involved in the Linux Desktop Testing Project about a year or so back. But he says the project maintainer Nagappan A has “probably been the biggest inspiration and motivator for me in FOSS,” he says. He was also a successful student in the Google Summer of Code ’06 Program under the GNOME organization, where he added support for LDTP under jhbuild among others.

Mohan adds: “I find more and more people adopting FOSS. However, the major problem lies in the college professors who are rather hesitant to adopt FOSS products. I have faced numerous problems each time I submit a project that runs on Linux. There were around two dozen students from India in this year’s GSoC program.”

Aneesh Kumar has contributed fixes for libtool and made Debian OpenSSI packages.He has integrated OpenSSI technology with other solutions, including keepalived and OpenDLM. “In India, I see a fair increase in the number of people working on FOSS projects as part of their day-to-day work. Take a look at Novell, IBM and HP and the employees working on FOSS projects. There are quite a lot. I guess the problem is that they are not as vocal as other members from other countries. And new project ideas driven by teams from India is also minimal. But, all in all, I guess we are going to see new heights of FOSS contribution from countries like India. Take a look at kernel newbies mailing list. Most of the list members are from India trying to learn about the Linux kernel. That’s a good sign,” he says.

Baishampayan ‘Bhaskar’ Ghose is a bit more critical. He recognizes FOSS.in’s ability to “send a positive signal” to businesses and government bodies about the “practical advantages of FOSS”, which could help its adoption. It could help Indian small and midsize enterprises working on FOSS to get more business. Or project the underplayed Indian FOSS community globally, showcase Indian talent, and be a place for the community to meet. But he expects more from such events to build the movement across India, to be held in different parts of the country — a job not without its challenges. And, coming from the free software world, he’s disappointed by the “lack of emphasis” on freedom in the event.

“We need to have more of these events and more frequently too. These events really advertise talent. Also the fact that we have international personalities like Alan Cox (who came in 2005), Harald Welte et al speaking at the same event, makes it that much more impressive,” Chaugule says.

“We have been writing to Linus [Torvalds] every year for the past six years inviting him. We hope to get him sometime around Linux Kernel 7.8.16 release time,” Chitnis commented on a mailing list discussing the event.