Dated October 07, 2004
The Financial Express

IBM India, C-DAC and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, have signed a co-operation agreement to set up an Open Source Software Resource Centre (OSSRC) in Mumbai with an investment of $1.2 million over the next three years.

Under this co-operation agreement, C-DAC, IIT Bombay and IBM would undertake activities to foster OSS development, enhance the understanding of the OSS model by imparting training and promote the development of content in areas of education and general awareness of OSS across the country.

An advisory board consisting of representatives from DIT, IBM, C-DAC and IIT as well as few other eminent academic and industry representatives will be constituted to review the project activities and progress.

According to the agreement, IBM will provide the hardware and software resources, management support and the overall support as well as participation in the implementation of OSSRC.

C-DAC will focus on setting up the necessary laboratory and development of skill sets, which includes physical infrastructure, Indian language technologies, and frameworks for OSS development, while IIT Bombay will direct the efforts in channelising the education sector including teacher training and content development on Open Source platforms.

The objective of OSSRC is to foster significant OSS development in India by establishing a development portal and initiating and spearheading significant proof of concept projects. The centre would undertake activities to increase understanding of OSS model as well as to foster development of good quality public domain content and courseware in various areas of education and general awareness by offering OSS-based authoring tools and mark languages, teacher training and setting up a content repository in order to develop workforce of relevance in the national context with OSS skills, and a faculty to impart them.

Secretary, department of information technology (IT), ministry of communications and IT, KK Jaswal said on the occasion, Open source software has altered the computing landscape. Now that it is blossoming in India as it is around the world, the nation needs to develop significant OSS capabilities and institute the resources that support and enhance its growth. This centre will help in expanding the open source segment of Indian software industry and create a skill set.

IBM India managing director, Shanker Annaswamy said, IBM India has been undertaking a number of activities to bring the benefits of IT to different sections of the community. This investment results in the growth of open source software, which will help in expanding the open source segment in Indian software industry.

Once the present framework with C-DAC and IIT Bombay gets established, other academic and research institutes in the country will partake in this endeavour.