Democracy, as a system, is completely dependent on communication, to the extent that when communication breaks down, so does the democratic process. In order for a group of people to participate equally in democracy, they must necessarily share a communication platform, where they can share not just facts, but also views and opinions. Small wonder then, that free speech is prized and cherished by all democracies, and coveted by citizens of almost all countries that are yet to become  democracies.

One of the fundamental requirements of free speech and participation in democracy is the availability of a free, open medium and platform of communication that is equally accessible by all members of the democratic community. Almost every culture in the world has a concept of a central community gathering place, where people gather after a day’s work, to talk and share information.

In India, this is typically the village chaupal, in West Kalimantan (erstwhile Borneo), Indonesia, it’s called a ruai. In Afghanistan, it may be called a chaikhana. These community structures have traditionally provided the common platform and free medium for communication.

This type of platform is structured like a circle, and the free medium is air. In a circular structure, everyone has an equal say, because everyone has equal access to the medium and equal reach to every other member of the platform. No special equipment is required to use this medium; ears and a mouth will typically suffice. These structures provided a way for people to voice their opinion, share their concerns and find solutions to conflict through dialogue.

After the industrial revolution and the dawn of the corporation, mass media began to play this role in people’s lives. Newspapers, radio and television became the new media that people used. These media had a much wider reach and they seemed like the perfect democratic tool. However, these media have a structural problem that prevents them from being truly democratic. By virtue of corporate and editorial hierarchy, these media are structured like a triangle (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Media communication

News, in this model, travels downwards from an elite minority that determines what content is “newsworthy” to the community. The community typically cannot relate the incoming news to their own lives, and either becomes disenfranchised by virtue of lack of representation, or assumes the media version of facts to be true, and that they themselves are an anomaly. At the very least, this influences their participation in democracy, and at worst, they are rendered voiceless in that most fundamental democratic process — debate.

This hierarchical model of modern commercial media requires profits for the media organisation to continue to run. This means that news needs to sell. If a newspaper cannot generate advertising revenue, it will soon shut down. Obviously, with profit as the first imperative, relevance of the content to the community and their feedback must become secondary. Moreover, there is an incentive in preventing communication technology from reaching its true potential. For example, if community radio became fully deregulated, would commercial radio or, for that matter, television, stand a chance?

This skewed set of incentives, and the resulting policies and actions, has led to several communities across the world, particularly in the developing world, becoming alienated and disenfranchised with mainstream society. These communities are particularly susceptible to coercion and this might partly explain the escalating violence in the world today.

This conundrum should be quite familiar to open source enthusiasts, since the basic principles involved are much the same as the ones in the open source vs closed source software debate. To draw a parallel from The Cathedral And The Bazaar, mainstream media follows the cathedral model, while community platforms are more like bazaars. Both paradigms have their value and importance in the structure of society at large. However, in the context of media, the cathedral or top-down model appears to have reached its limits of effectiveness — and, in my opinion, has passed the point of diminishing returns.

The growth of user-generated content on the Internet over the last decade is a clear indicator that as connectivity improves, people are increasingly eager to directly voice their opinions and concerns without the need of mainstream media as an intermediary, particularly since in the real world, no intermediary is perfectly impartial.

The developing world

In the developing world, this uprising of citizen media has been stunted by the uneven distribution of resources, such as infrastructure, connectivity and literacy. While connectivity in the developed world has allowed the blogosphere to become a political force to contend with, most developing countries have an Internet penetration of less than 10 per cent, typically concentrated in urban areas.

Even where connectivity exists, the vast majority of users are only just starting to view the Internet as anything more than email and instant messaging. In many of these countries, even as economies have opened up and globalisation has settled in, entire communities are still disconnected from the rest of the world, primarily because they do not represent a market segment worthy of media representation.

Mainstream media in these countries typically focus on urban issues that relate to economic and political decision makers, rather than the vox populi.

In several of these countries, however, innovation is now taking place to bridge this gap by other means. While Internet penetration remains low, the use of mobile phones is a different story altogether. Most of the developing world has far outpaced the developed world in terms of mobile phone adoption and versatility of usage. Even in places where people earn less than a dollar a day, cell phones are ubiquitous. A medium that uses voice, the oldest mode of communication known to man, amplified by several orders of magnitude, so as to cover unimaginable distances, is as irresistible to a Gond tribal in Chhattisgarh, India, as it is to a street food vendor in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Recognising the potential of this medium, several groups are now actively engaged in developing technology to allow people to use their voice to connect themselves and their communities to the rest of the world. One of the first tools of this new age of innovation is the audio portal.

An audio portal?

An audio portal (Figure 2) is essentially a website with a lot of audio content that can be accessed both through the Web as well as by phone.

Figure 2: An audio portal

While the Web interface is usually like a blog, the phone interface is an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system, where users press keys to navigate through menus and content. In more advanced IVR systems, voice recognition may be used, though this is still limited to the well-documented accents of the English language. The Web interface is very similar to a blog, and several audio portals do use the blog layout.

Behind the scenes, the platform will also provide an interface to manage posts. Early implementations of audio portals tended to rely on specialised moderation consoles, which have media-previewing capabilities as well as functionality for moderators to add metadata, such as a summary and title, to the content to make it friendlier to users on the Web.

Users will typically call the IVR interface to record and listen to content using their cell phones, while Web users will access the website interface to listen to the audio posts using a browser, and leave comments in text, which then may or may not be converted to audio using a text-to-speech system.

People who own the latest Android or iPhone may find the idea of an IVR interface to browse content somewhat counter-intuitive, since it makes no sense to call in and scroll through a set of menus, particularly with an irritatingly monotonic voice rattling out instructions all the time, when you can simply open the Web page on your cell phone’s browser, and read.

The graph in Figure 3 may help clarify why a purely visual interface is not adequate to reach the majority of the world.

Figure 3: Cell phone and broadband users

The percentage of Internet users, even among the mobile phone users of the world, is a fraction of the percentage of people using their phones purely for voice and SMS. While mobile Internet use is, and will continue to be, on the rise, the bulk of the world will continue to be on voice for some time to come.

This is also historically consistent, since most societies have far stronger oral traditions than written ones. Voice captures much more than simply language. Tone, quality, emotion are all interwoven in the spoken word. If a picture is worth a thousand written words, then a spoken word counts for at least a few hundred… not to mention that drawing an attractive picture takes considerably more skill than speaking!

What makes mobile phones particularly attractive as a medium, though, is the two-way nature of the medium. With radio and television, though the reach may be much wider than mobile phones, the ability to respond immediately to what you hear or see — on the same platform, at the same level as the source, which is extremely valuable in fostering dialogue — is missing.

The audio portal concept caters to every cell phone, whether mass-market or smartphone equally, which works very well to level the platform. Most importantly, audio portals use technology, skills and other resources that are available now, as opposed to those that require extensive “capacity building” exercises. This is probably the reason why audio portals, as a tool, find more favour with grassroots workers and members of the community, rather than with technology evangelists and academia.

The technology

Audio portals utilise relatively simple technology, most of which has been around in the open source world for some time. An audio portal will typically consist of a phone interface (either fixed-line or mobile), connected to a content-management system (usually a database) and a Web front-end, via an IVR running on a soft switch or software PBX system. Two examples of audio portal platforms are Swara and FreedomFone.

Swara

Swara is an open source project, originally written as a research project by students and professors at MIT to augment the outreach and activities of CGNet, a people’s discussion group working with indigenous communities in central India. CGNet was started by veteran journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary, who returned to Central India, where he grew up, to find it torn by violence. Probing to find the reason for the conflict, he quickly realised that open, accessible community media would be a key component of any solution to the conflict. Given that Internet penetration in the region is less than 1 per cent, and community radio is limited by regulation, the next best medium for a community platform was the mobile phone.

The first pilot of Swara was deployed in Bengaluru for use by indigenous communities in Chhattisgarh and neighbouring states in February 2010. Today, the pilot receives over 300 calls a day, and the team is working on building the platform out as an open source project for deployment in other locations. The first replica of the project went live in Indonesia in December 2011.

Swara uses a combination of the Asterisk PBX system in combination with the LoudBlog audio blogging platform, with the integration written in Python. The tested interfaces are GSM gateways (Topex Mobilink, etc) and fixed lines (PRI/BRI) using a Digium telephony card.

FreedomFone

FreedomFone was developed by Alberto Escudero Pascual and Louise Berthilson of IT46, a Swedish IT consultancy, for the Kubatana Trust in Zimbabwe. It was created for many of the same reasons as Swara was developed in India, i.e., lack of impartial and open commercial media, and the need for local and community-level reporting. The FreedomFone pilot, a weekly audio magazine called Inzwa, has been running in Zimbabwe since July 2009, and received over 2,500 calls between July and September 2009. FreedomFone’s team is also working on developing the platform as a user-friendly DIY IVR kit, and is keen on replicating the model in other areas.

FreedomFone uses the FreeSWITCH soft switch to interface with telephony devices such as the Mobigater and Office Router GSM gateways. The content management system is written in CakePHP, and FreedomFone additionally uses the Cepstral speech synthesis system for text-to-speech conversions. The stated objective is to create a purely phone-accessible platform.

Deployment 101

Both platforms have an almost identical design, as would most audio portal software. This is almost analogous to how traditional websites are built, with the choice of platform being similar to the choice between different Web frameworks. Just as you will find lots of different opinions and preferences for Web platforms among Web designers, you will find that the few implementers of audio portals are just as varied in their preferences for platforms. This usually depends on which platform the implementer is most familiar with — and if you are implementing your own, one is essentially as good as the other.

The key question, irrespective of which platform you use, is one of deployment strategy. At present, most implementations of audio portals as community media platforms are centralised instances deployed by a single organisation or group, with a specific agenda (such as news, healthcare or governance).

Centralised function-oriented deployment

Centralised, function-oriented deployments require content of a certain quality and, as a result, must usually be moderated. Speech-recognition technology, particularly in the area of automatic transcription, is still a far cry from being very accurate. As a result, moderating a function-specific audio portal is still a manual job, for the most part.

Typically, audio portal moderators will need to listen to each message and summarise and/or transcribe it. Beyond transcription, there may be more work to do to improve the quality of the content for the specific purpose of the deployment, like sound quality clean-ups and edits, fact verification (if journalism is the function, for example) and categorisation. All of this work is further exacerbated in a centralised deployment, since all incoming calls come to the same central hub (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Centralised deployments

In India, and other countries where long-distance call charges are higher than local call charges, centralised platforms also suffer from an added cost element, since all callers must call the central number, regardless of their own locations.

Hyperlocal deployments

An alternative model is a hyperlocal community-oriented one. In this model, an instance of the platform is deployed at the community level and maintained by community members. Such community-level audio portals could be used as voice-based bulletin boards. By managing the size of the user base, and ensuring a manageable user adoption rate by limiting publicity to word of mouth, communities could eliminate the need for moderation by making sure everyone on the platform was known by the others and therefore accountable to the community.

Several communities can then choose to link their platforms, either by sharing content, or by simply listening to each other. This will eventually lead to an organically expanding network, where people can choose which deployments they want to subscribe to, much in the same way as Internet users subscribe to different forums and websites. This would also ease the burden on centralised deployments already in existence, since they could then simply trawl the community bulletin boards for usable content, rather than filter out unusable content on their own incoming stream. As you can see from Figure 5, the hyperlocal model offers more avenues for collaboration and the cross-fertilisation of ideas between communities than the centralised model.

Figure 5: The advantage of hyperlocal deployments

A word of caution: This approach is still experimental, and needs several more deployments before it can be considered a best practice. However, for communities interested in improving their information access and level of participation in mainstream society, this is a very worthwhile experiment to take on. Both systems described here can be installed on a mid-range notebook computer.

The software is all open source and free for non-commercial use. Mobile interfaces like GSM gateways and mobile ATAs are relatively cheap — a Matrix SETU ATA 211G would cost roughly US$ 120, and the Mobigater is priced at about US$ 50. The total cost of setting up a local IVR installation and running it through a year, including the cost of connectivity, is typically less than US$ 200 a year.

Of course, the most important thing to remember while setting up an alternative communication platform is that while technology will certainly provide the tools, the key to success is to build a strong community around your platform, and quickly demonstrate value to the community from participating. This is where most of the hard work lies.

It would be interesting to see how well the open source community in India takes to these projects and how quickly the hyperlocal model can be tested with several more installations.

References

• Swara Project on GitHub
• Swara Community
• CGNet Swasra
• FreedomFone Project

There are a plethora of free/open source databases around, from the good old Berkeley DB, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and the newer NoSQL DBs like MongoDB, to mention a few. Most of these have easy-to-use GUI interfaces too. As a result, the threshold to becoming a “database administrator” has become very low, and the quality of the average database is abysmal. People who do not know the A or B of database design are happily doing mission-critical stuff. Referential integrity is unheard of, and in the interests of temporary speed gains, the concept of normal forms is discarded.

As for security, don’t make me laugh. SQL injection was discovered in the last century, and the prevention is simple and well known — but guess which is still one of the most popular ways of cracking websites?

I try to keep this column as non-tech as possible, so I do not want to go deep into all of this. Since it is probably adequately covered in other articles in this issue, I will restrict myself to recounting my personal experiences in the world of SQL, as well as some things I have learned from the course in Python/Django that I run, which covers RDBMS usage.

I started my journey with MySQL, which at that time was the only option available and to be frank, used it for several years without knowing a thing about database design, or SQL, for that matter. I used Webmin to create and administer the DB, and Perl to connect the data to my application.

At that time, MySQL did not have foreign keys, transactions, sub-queries and a lot of other features that one nowadays associates with the idea of an RDBMS. Also, the manual had a lot of pages loudly proclaiming that these things were unnecessary. So I learned a lot of bad habits. And I had to write a lot of code to make sure only valid data went into the DB, and valid stuff came out of it. This was because I did not trust the DB.

At that time, I started working with an open source application that used PostgreSQL — so I asked the author why he did not have a MySQL version. He responded that the integrity of the data is the responsibility of the DB and that he had no intention of writing huge amounts of code to do what the DB should do anyway.

Lesson Number 1: The database has to look after the integrity of the data.

So I shifted to PostgreSQL. But there was no usable GUI for it. I was frantic, but there was no alternative. I had to learn command-line SQL — and since PostgreSQL was more or less ANSI-standard, I had to learn SQL. Since I had to find out what all the fancy “new” things like foreign keys, sub-queries, triggers, views, transactions, etc., were, I had to learn a bit of database design theory and got introduced to normal forms.

Although PostgreSQL will not let you do silly things like accessing it as the root or entering a date like 31st of February, or even referring to a non-existent table as a foreign key, it is quite possible to create a database in a MySQL kind of way.

Lesson No 2: Database design, especially adherence to the first two normal forms, is essential.

Then I went into production with a completely normalised database, which was well and carefully designed. My client was happy, since he was making money. And then, horror of horrors, he needed large-scale changes in the database structure. That’s when I learned lesson No 3: Any idiot can create a database, but it takes experience, skill, courage and command-line knowledge to alter one in production. In the ultimate analysis, no tool is going to help you.

This is the strangest article I have written for LFY, in the sense that I started out to say something, and wound up saying something else. But on re-reading it, I find it expresses something that I passionately believe in. So I hope someone, somewhere finds it of interest.

Quoting EFF on why making our collective voices heard against these bills is important:

The Internet blacklist legislation — known as PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House — invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!

To make the most impact right now, we’re asking YOU to do two things. Today, use our handy tool to send an email to your representatives, letting them know you oppose these bills and they should too. Then, on January 23, when the Senate is back in session (and scheduled to vote on PIPA on January 24), call your Senator and tell him or her that it’s time to stand with the Internet and against the Internet blacklists!

Since LINUX For You is based out of India, unfortunately we can’t write to the US Senators and Representatives in protest. Thus, instead, we thought of documenting how some of the major websites of the world took a stand against the bill — because, if bills like these pass, the dark days of Internet won’t be too far fetched.

Well, imagine a world without our favorite reference website

The official website of Free Software Foundation, along with all its other portals, display a common homepage for 24 hours

linuxforu.com uses the WordPress engine for managing it's content. And it's heartening to see the project has taken its stand.

news.opensuse.org has taken a stand by redirecting all traffic to sopastrike.com

boingboing.net, one of our favourite source of 'free' news, has gone dark for 24 hours

Mozilla, the foundation and project that is 'dedicated to keeping the Web free, open and accessible to all', will join the cause for 12 hours soon

michaelmoore.com, the home of award-winning writer and documentary film maker, is off for 24 hours in protest

reddit.com discussion forum will go dark for 12 hours — and their clock is ticking

O'Reilly, one of our favourite publishers, will go dark for 12 hours. And it's not just oreilly.com, but all of its other web properties too. Ironically, bills like SOPA and PIPA claim that they are for the well-being of publishers.

status.net official blog reports they will take down identi.ca for 12 hours

Well, the reason for documenting this stand by some of the major websites is to point out that although these bills are US bases, however, if passed they will pose a major threat to the “open Web” as we know it.

Already our very own [Indian] government is taking matters to court in order to put restrictions on our “free speech”. What’s worse is the judge has even come up with threats like — here’s quoting a report by Glyn Moody:

“Like China, we will block all such websites,” Justice Suresh Kait said while asking counsel for Facebook and Google India to develop a mechanism to keep a check and remove “offensive and objectionable” material from their web pages.

And we, like naïves, thought “free speech” was our constitutional right? Wake up, the “BIG BROTHER is watching!” They will refuse to bow down to our “rights”.

Well, in the spirit of Free Software, where the word “free” means — not free as in free beer, but free speech — we must stand up for our rights.

In the words of great Bob Marley, let us “get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!”, before it’s too late.

Read more about SOPA/PIPA and why bills like these are harmful here:

• How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation
• Tim O’Reilly’s comments — well, because a publisher’s comments matter, because he feels “SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy“
• EFF’s Deeplinks Blog

Update (1613 Hrs IST): While, visiting google.com from outsite the US only shows a “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” message right under the search box, the US version of the site (if you’re from outside the US set your browser to use a US proxy server from proxyblind.org before visiting google.com) appears somewhat like this:

Google censors its logo

Bold move! If only the search service was also off for a day…

Update (2005 Hrs IST): reddit.com, oreilly.com, identi.ca, and mozilla.org screen grabs:

reddit.com is now black

So is identi.ca

So is oreilly.com…

And finally, mozilla.org

Open source has opened minds and provided a great amount of freedom of choice not just to organisations but to our government as well. In my view, open source has brought about a change in the way we view and adapt to technology. We are seeing a paradigm shift from packaged software to open source standards not just within organisations, but also at the government level. A significant amount of government administration processes have been simplified by employing various open source tools.

In the last five years, there has been a sudden rise in open source developers being hired. There is a huge untapped potential for developers in the open source domain. However, it remains to be seen what measures the government is taking at the central and the state levels to implement this technology and how it is addressing the challenges associated with migrating to open source.

Both at the central and state levels, governments have formulated policies promoting the adoption of Linux and other open source software for several years now. Initiatives such as the National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) and BOSS Linux from Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) point to the government’s level of involvement in spreading awareness about and driving the adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Individual bodies such as C-DAC and the National Informatics Center (NIC) have made enormous contributions to the adoption and migration of operations on the open source platform.

The government’s emphasis on open standards such as the Open Document Format (ODF) has also helped create a favourable climate for the adoption of FOSS within the government. Setting up independent bodies to execute OSS adoption/migration projects is evidence of the high interest levels in this sector. For example, the State government of Assam insists that all office documents be shared only in the Open Document Format to maintain compatibility and this is a statutory message that appears in all mails.

Similarly, the IT policy of the Government of Kerala is also very supportive of open source. In recent years, the hardware and software procurement policies of our government have been made largely vendor-neutral, creating a level playing field for Linux and open source software. Several massive projects such as the state service gateways, the National Knowledge Network, etc., are in the development phases now and for most of them the entire infrastructure is new, so Linux and open source software have been adopted.

“The policy on Open Standards for e-governance” notified by the Government of India in November, 2010 mandates adoption of royalty free open standards for all e-governance projects. This brings in a level playing field for Open Source software in the multi-billion dollar e-governance market in India.

Similarly, private organisations are realising the importance of migrating to OSS. Sectors like BFSI and telecom currently derive the maximum benefit of OSS. They are realising that OSS eventually yields better results in terms of quality, performance and pricing.

Adoption challenges in enterprises

The adoption of OSS at the desktop in enterprises faces several challenges because of the legacy of poorly written client-server applications, and Web applications “optimised” for Internet Explorer 5.0, etc. Some of the other key hurdles are discussed below:

Applications — the biggest bottleneck for Linux adoption

Some time ago, a major financial institution in India was evaluating Linux as an option for its desktops. It had more than 50 custom applications, most of which were Web applications that had been developed over the last decade. The Web applications were supposedly platform-agnostic, but when they were tested on a Linux desktop, it was discovered that just 10 per cent of the applications worked flawlessly.

The rest had many compatibility issues, especially with Active-X controls, IE-specific Java script code, the use of IE-specific code, invocation of locally installed Windows applications from within the Web applications, etc. The company found that the only way it could successfully migrate to Linux on the desktop was by first making all its applications truly platform agnostic at the client level.

An interesting side effect of migration is that many organisations suddenly realise the importance of having access to the source code. When an organisation wants to transform its legacy apps to cross-platform apps, it often finds that it does not have access to the source code to most of the custom developed applications.

It is almost impossible to make any changes to the applications, as the firms do not have any ongoing maintenance contract with the original vendor that developed the software, nor do they have access to the source code.

Major ISVs are not enthusiastic

This is a classic chicken-or-egg scenario. The packaged software supplied by major ISVs poses a big challenge in any large scale migration initiative. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) claim that they would support Linux better if there is demand from the market. Enterprises insist that they would migrate when there is better support for Linux from the ISVs.

Organisational practices

When a large media organisation in India decided to migrate to Linux as the OS platform, the biggest hindrance it faced was that it had dozens of MS-Office (MS-Excel) macros that had been developed and, in most cases, its partner organisations also built their workflows around these macros. Now, for migration, the organisation had to make an inventory of all its macros, document and rationalise their use, and get them translated into Open Office Macros with a significant investment of money and time, before it could adopt Linux and OpenOffice.org.

Solutions and opportunities

These hurdles can be easily overcome with a six-step approach. Here are the six essential steps to open source migration:

1. Discovery
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Planning
5. Implementation
6. Maintenance

Quality time and effort spent in the Discovery and Analysis phase, will lead to an optimal solution design. Implementation itself is generally done in multiple phases for an easy roll out. The trick for successful implementation is to prioritise the applications and attack those that are most compatible with the system, and then deal with the non-compatible applications.

Enterprises can exercise freedom of choice on the OS front by taking the determined stand “If it is not cross-platform, it is not in”, and embarking on a drive to make current applications platform agnostic. This will not only make the Linux migration more effective and sustainable, but will also have the additional benefit of being ready for any future devices.

To summarise, there is an increased awareness about the benefits of the open source model and a realisation that these benefits extend far beyond the cost advantages. There is also a demand for tools and products developed under a truly open source model supported by enterprises and government.

I started work on this spin with a simple goal, which I will put into perspective here. My work and play involves programming, writing articles, visualisation and analysis of numerical data — and hence, I use a lot of open source libraries and tools to assist me. If you haven’t guessed already, I end up installing these tools every single time I do a fresh install of Linux. This motivated the need for a Linux distribution with these tools preinstalled, specifically targeted at users like me, who use Linux for scientific work. The Fedora community’s popularity and the insanely simple process of creating spins provided an ideal launch pad.

Now let us take a brief look at the applications and libraries currently available in Fedora Scientific.

Applications in Fedora Scientific

The current set of applications shipped in Fedora Scientific are broadly classified into the following categories:

• Scientific computing tools and environments: The numerical computing package GNU Octave, the computer algebra system Maxima, with its front-end wxMaxima, the Python scientific libraries SciPy, NumPy and Spyder (a Python environment for scientific computing) are some of the software included in this category. A development environment for R, the statistical computing environment, is also included, and so are the ROOT tools for analysing large amounts of data.
• Generic programming and development tools and libraries: Software in this category includes the GNU C/C++ and FORTRAN compilers, the OpenJDK Java development tools, and the IDEs NetBeans and Eclipse. Also included are autotools, flex, bison, ddd and valgrind.
• Parallel and distributed programming tools/libraries: Software tools and libraries included in this category include the popular parallel programming libraries OpenMPI, PVM, and the shared-memory programming library OpenMP. Also included is the Torque resource manager to enable you to set up a batch-processing system.
• Editing, drawing and visualisation tools: So you have simulated your grand experiments, and need to visualise the data, plot graphs, and create publication-quality articles and figures. The tools included to help you in this include LaTex compilers and the Texmaker and Kile editors, plotting and visualisation tools Gnuplot, xfig, MayaVi, Dia and Ggobi , and the vector graphics tool Inkscape.
• Version control, backup tools and document managers: Version control and backup tools are included to help you manage your data and documents better — Subversion, Git and Mercurial are available, along with the backup tool backintime. Also included is a bibliography manager, BibTool.

Besides these four main categories, some of the other miscellaneous utilities include: hevea (the awesome LaTex-to-HTML converter), GNU Screen and IPython. You can find the complete list of all the additional packages included in the spin here.

Fedora Spins

Now that we have taken a look at Fedora Scientific, let us explore the enabler behind it. What made Fedora Scientific possible is the Fedora Spins effort. Quoting from the website: “Fedora Spins are alternate versions of Fedora, tailored for various types of users, via hand-picked application sets or customisations.” As of the Fedora 16 release, there are nine custom spins — six of them highly customised for niche audiences like security professionals, designers, kids, researchers and robotics enthusiasts.

Creating a custom Fedora Spin is really easy. And unlike a lot of things in life, it is as easy to do it as it is to talk about it. A tool called livecd-creator is used to create a custom Fedora Spin. A configuration file called a kickstart file needs to be created first, where you specify the list of packages that you want to be installed. You can also specify various other custom configurations, such as the desktop icons, launchers, etc. You can take a look at the kickstart files for all the Fedora Spins over here. If you have an idea for a custom spin, start by taking a look at one of these spins and then creating a kickstart file for yourself.

Once you have a kickstart file ready, you can use livecd-creator to create a customised Live ISO using the following code:

# livecd-creator --config=fedora-livecd-custom.ks --fslabel=Fedora-Live-Custom-CD -- cache=/var/cache/live

This will start the spinning process for your shiny new Fedora Spin. Once you have the ISO, you can write it to a USB stick using the ‘dd’ command.

Where next?

First, if your interest in this article was to know more about Fedora Scientific, then head to its website to download an ISO and try it for yourself. While you are at it, you may direct your queries and comments to the SciTech SIG mailing list, or use the other forms of communication listed in the support tab.

However, if your interest was to know more about Fedora Spins in general, head over to the Fedora Spins page, and learn more about the Fedora Spins process. Happy spinning!

The FOSS methodology recognises that software development is a process that never ends. The developer adopts the end-user as a partner, and the software constantly evolves in an ascending spiral: development-production-development-production… the turn-around time is very short, and the pace of development is phenomenal.

A classic example of this mode of development is Google — they are continuously throwing applications into the wild, often half-baked and unfinished. Not all applications click — some fall by the wayside, others flourish and slowly develop into sophisticated, slick-looking applications. Google can do this because the company is developer-oriented from top to bottom. The company understands how software is developed. The same is true of Facebook, YouTube and hundreds of cutting-edge companies.

As important as the above (if not more important) is the fact that computers are not human — they do not “think” like human beings. In fact, they do not think at all. And any attempt to program a computer to replicate the way humans think and act is going to wind up as an unholy and ugly mess.

For developers, it is great to work for Google, Facebook or one of the many startups where the bosses actually know what they are doing. Unfortunately, most of us have to work with MBAs and other assorted suits, who think that ordering software is like ordering a birthday cake — so much flavour, so much icing, the correct decoration — all delivered on time, ready to eat. And if it is not perfect, refuse to pay the agreed rate. This works fine for a birthday cake or a wedding suit — but it does not work for software.

Potential employers/bosses fall into three categories:

1. People who know what they are doing — this post does not concern them.
2. Startups, mainly Web-based, run by people who think they know what they are doing, but actually do not have a clue.
3. Non-IT-based businesses that are seeking to leverage IT to improve their businesses.

The startup guy — often sitting in an incubator, with a venture capitalist sitting on his tail — has his birthday cake planned to the last candle, and he wants you to deliver it on time, exactly according to specifications, no questions asked. So what do you do? Deliver what he asks for, take the money and run?

Or try and knock some sense into him — in which case, he usually takes to his heels and finds someone more amenable. I do not have the answer to this.

Linux was introduced in 1993, and ever since, it has been plagued by a variety of misconceptions. This has left a large number of people sceptical about using Linux. As a result, the mere mention of open source is known to intimidate many computer users who are not entirely aware of what open source is, and how to use it.

Last month, LINUX For You conducted a poll on its Facebook page to find out what the most common myths about open source are. 451 of the 666 people polled voted that the most common myth was, ‘Linux is just for geeks.” The results make it evident that the pseudo-complexity associated with open source is the main reason that misleads most computer users into believing that Linux is not for them.

Sreekandh Balakrishnan, an independent consultant, feels that Linux was once meant for geeks — but despite the changes it has been through, the belief still prevails. “To an extent, the Linux community was earlier made up of geeks. However, it is getting attention from the mainstream market, and many consumers are demanding laptops loaded with Ubuntu. Five years back, I would have agreed that Linux was a geek thing, but today, it is so user-friendly that regular consumers want it. Of late, distributions like Ubuntu and other Live CDs have made it simple to have a system running Linux up in ten minutes,” Balakrishnan states. He also notes that since consumers make their choices based on advertisements, they go for products that are marketed well, “Linux gets left behind, not because it is lower-grade, but because the marketing campaigns for paid products are perceived to be better.”

Are you smarter than a third grader?

It is assumed that Linux is a programmer’s OS, but Linux sports very intuitive interfaces, and requires no special skills, such that even school kids use it. Linux engineering manager at Dell India R&D, Divyanshu Verma, illustrates, “A few years ago, my friend bought a Linux desktop, but he was baffled at the very thought of using it. However, he decided to try it, considering other operating systems’ vulnerability to viruses. Meanwhile, his eight-year-old son learned it quickly, and today, he does all his school assignments and plays computer games using Linux. This proves that anyone who can let go of the mind block can easily get acquainted with Linux.”

Abhijit Das, an IT consultant, cannot agree more, “I have been using Linux for over three years, and I find it as simple to use as proprietary software. In fact, my five-year-old daughter, Sara, knows how to find her way around on my Linux-based system, and can play games on it. I do not think people need an education in FOSS to learn how to use it.”

One of the main reasons why people believe Linux is for geeks is because they think it is not as user-friendly as proprietary software. Prakash Advani, regional manager, Canonical (Asia-Pacific), has been in the IT industry for over 18 years, and he feels that Ubuntu operating systems are as simple as it can get. “Ubuntu 11.10 is much easier to use and install than many other popular operating systems. Once people try Ubuntu, the experience will change their perception about Linux,” he says.

Is open source secure enough?

According to the Facebook survey, the second most common myth is, “Open source software is not secure, as the source code is ‘open’.” Right from the early days of open source computing, Linux has been portrayed as a difficult and unsecured operating system. However, Advani has been using Linux for over 15 years, and has never faced a problem so far.

He vouches, “I do not even run an anti-virus! People are apprehensive because the code is open, but any change to the code has to go through a quality check. ‘Open’ means anyone can review it, but not everyone has the authority to change the core application. Many projects have a process of approving a new contributor before they accept code. This ensures that only the good code gets in. There is also the peer review, which ensures that the code is good.”

It is even predicted that the use of Linux at the enterprise level will increase immensely. A Gartner study found that 99 per cent of Global 2,000 enterprises would include open source in their mission-critical software portfolios by 2016, up from 75 per cent in 2010.

Narayana Menon, lead, Strategy and Marketing (South Asia), agrees: “I believe that the adoption of Linux in enterprises would continue to grow, not just because of the flexibility and cost benefits, but also due to factors like adaptability, portability and being hardware-agnostic. The Linux market in India has been growing yearly at a steady 14 to 16 per cent. This is fuelling the growth of an ecosystem around the model, which  includes customers, vendors, systems integrators/partners, developers and the open source community. The evolution of a strong ecosystem around a commercially viable model ensures that Linux is marketed more outside the technical community as well.”

Show me the money

The myth “It is difficult to make money from open source” ranked third in our survey. Since open source is “free”, many wonder where the money in open source comes from. The open source business model is different, and the money comes from services and support, not from the license. Companies like Red Hat and Novell offer paid support plans and specialised Linux-based software to business users.

Anuj Kumar, MD, Red Hat India, explains, “One can download open source software without paying for licenses. However, support, management and upgrades are required to run the software. This is where commercial open source generates revenue. At Red Hat, our business model is referred to as the subscription model, and it is the most effective way to deploy, manage, and secure open source technology.”

Moreover, the need for skilled manpower due to increased commercial Linux deployment also drives more Linux training and certification. “More employment opportunities ensure that the ‘geeks’ can make a living with Linux, rather than treating Linux as an indulgence for their spare time. The commercial benefits of the model also allow companies like SUSE to invest in research and development, opening more employment opportunities. This model provides a win-win scenario for all involved, offering different benefits to customers, partners and vendors.”

What’s free about open source?

Jyothi Bacche, head, Open Source Practice, MindTree, feels that the most prevalent myth about open source is, “‘Free’ in FOSS means ‘free’ as in ‘cost’.” ‘Free’ in this context is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Bachhe reveals that she has seen many users only treating open source software as freeware, not focusing on the rights it gives to users in terms of free access to source code.

In the Facebook survey, the least number of votes went to, “It is difficult for open source professionals to find a job.” Advani reasons, “This is because people know that there is great scope in open source and FOSS professionals are more in demand, and that they usually get a higher salary.”

The bottom line

The arguments for and against open source gradually get trivialised once people start exploring open source for themselves. Verma feels that Linux and open source have to be popularised among the mainstream audience. “We, as developers and users, have a responsibility to spread the word that Linux is for everybody,” Advani concludes.

By the way, here’s a screenshot of he now-closed Facebook poll results.

The power of Android was felt strongly at Droidcon India, the first-ever international Android conference in the country. The heavy turnout of Android lovers at Droidcon India, held in Bengaluru, shows the growing craze for the Android platform. The two-day conference had over 550 participants from different parts of the country. An increasing number of developers are also getting into the Android business in India.

Lectures and presentations made at the event took the audience through building a distribution from scratch to making robots with Android and Arduino, and designing mobile apps. The conference covered a range of topics like building well-designed apps, dealing with device diversity, performance optimisation, NFC, and usage in the enterprise.

Varun V, a software professional from Bengaluru who attended the event, said that he got many ideas after attending the technical sessions, apart from the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people who work for Android and develop open source software. He said, “It was good to meet people working in other companies who share my enthusiasm for Android and have their way of innovation on the platform.”

Kiran Jonalagadda, founder of HasGeek, expressed his happiness about the development of Android into such a gigantic platform in India. He said, “We tend to believe that Android does not have a base in the Tier II cities of the country, which is incorrect. There is a lot of interest in Android in the Tier II cities. The Android app scene is yet to catch up in India, but the enterprise adoption of Android is the next big thing for the open source mobile operating system.”

Don’t be unfair to Android

Android is getting bigger, better and even more powerful in all parts of the world including India. Diogo Ferreira, a young hacker who turned up at the event believes that Android will power everything—from refrigerators and heaters to, of course, most of the mobile devices.

Ferreira believes that this open source mobile operating system will be ubiquitous, powering digital devices across the board. He said, “We’ll see it power everything … even cars, maybe.”

The sheer fact that Android is open source has convinced Ferreira that the platform has the potential to go places. He said that being open source, it can be adopted by anyone who wants to. “Those interested just need to take the code and modify it in the direction of their choice,” he says.

Ferreira, who is currently working on his Ph.D, is a known name in the Android world. He has developed apps and contributed significant amounts of code. He is a part of CyanogenMod team, which maintains a community version of Android. It is a distribution of Android that you can install in the device after you buy it. It offers features like private browsing, or something as simple as FM radio that a manufacturer may choose not to enable. He says that the beauty of CyanogenMod is its property of enabling customisation. It allows the developers to build what they want and use it on their device.

Commenting on the issue of Android dealing with the “hardware interface” and the perception that it is only for geeks, Ferreira said that it is unfair to make a comparison between low-end, slower-processing devices that run on Android with iPhone. If an iPhone is positioned against a high-end Android device, the latter is bound to be the clear winner, he believes. The issues with the user interface, he adds, are currently being addressed by Google and users can expect a huge improvement shortly.

Having said that, the young hacker believes that Android is one platform that can bridge the gap between the high-end and low-end devices. He said, “Even if we consider the notion that the Android performance is not to the optimum level, people who can’t afford an iPhone should be able to own a good device.”

Android gives them that choice.

The Supreme Court of India has directed all courts across the nation to switch over to Ubuntu 10.04 as their primary operating system. This decision from the apex court is seen as a bold move, as it earlier used the RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) OS. The Supreme Court has also given all the courts customised Ubuntu Linux DVDs for installation.

Over 17,000 courts across the country were using RHEL 5 for the last four years. The e-committee of the Supreme Court of India has issued a circular for the “Guidelines for Roll-out and Installation of Ubuntu Linux for Indian Judiciary” [PDF] [Original Source]. The circular talks about the replication and installation of the Ubuntu Linux OS. The circular requires that an acknowledgement of the receipt and installation of the Ubuntu Linux DVD be given by judicial officers in a prescribed form.

A detailed video tutorial (note that it’s in OGG format — good times, I must add), and a PDF file containing 25 salient features of Ubuntu Linux have also been created and uploaded on the Supreme Court’s website.

The circular asks that all systems officers and systems assistants working under the eCourts project be instructed to download and watch the video, and understand the contents of the PDF file, so that they can provide support to judicial officers and the courts for the installation and use of Ubuntu Linux OS on laptops and desktops. The circular also mandates the immediate circulation of the “Ubuntu Installation & Features” video to all judicial officers, so that they can understand this before the DVD reaches them.

“The Ubuntu Linux OS can be installed by the judicial officers on their own also, as the installation process is very easy, intuitive and self-explanatory. In fact, it will be a welcome change, and a desired enablement of judicial officers, if they become self-reliant in this aspect also. It is only required of judicial officers that if they are installing Ubuntu Linux on their laptops by themselves, they should first download and watch the video. They must then take a backup of their data. Only then should they proceed with the installation,” mentions the circular.

<h2>Features of the Ubuntu Linux OS DVD</h2>
The customised install offers the following features to users: the ability to send and receive faxes, use 15 Indian languages and 48 layouts, recover deleted/lost data, run as a live (trial) DVD or recovery DVD for Windows/Linux, and install in a dual-boot configuration. The DVD also provides a talking dictionary (English-Hindi-Urdu), English text-to-speech, multimedia (audio/video) playback, drivers for printers/scanners, Web camera drivers, mail/chat/social networking clients, a typing tutor for English typing, a screen recorder, personal accounting, a Windows emulator (WINE), video tutorials and user guides, virtual OS support (VirtualBox), mobile broadband and 3G, network and printer sharing, thin-client support, and PDF tools.

It is installable on a pen-drive (4 GB+), is Bluetooth-enabled, features digital signatures, and includes backup software.

Free SMS channel for Ubuntu Linux tips

A free SMS channel has also been created for judicial officers, technical personnel and the members of the court’s staff, to increase awareness about Ubuntu’s features and functionality. A circular released in this regard says that it is a free Google SMS channel called “Ubuntu-Linux”. The objective is to send regular SMS messages with Ubuntu tips, tricks and information.

The circular says, “This channel can be subscribed to by sending the first subscription SMS to the Google mobile no. 9870807070. The delivery of regular SMS to the subscriber’s mobile is absolutely free. To subscribe to the Ubuntu-Linux SMS channel, users need to send the following SMS (in small or capital letters) to 9870807070: ‘ON UBUNTU-LINUX’. The channel can also be subscribed to via the Internet.”

Community’s take on the move…
T. Shrinivasan, co-ordinator, Indian Linux Users Group-Chennai “It is a great initiative by the Central Government, and will be a great example for other departments and state governments regarding migrating to open source technologies. We of the Indian Linux Users Group-Chennai can provide our support to the courts around here. “The community can provide support on installation, apart from technical and training support for all Ubuntu users in the courts. We can conduct one-day workshops on using Ubuntu. We can also arrange for workshops in other parts of the country by connecting with various LUGs and commercial vendors. “I think Ubuntu 10.04 is very stable and simple to use. It lets beginners easily migrate from other operating systems. The availability of tons of applications from Ubuntu repositories (accessible via the Synaptic package manager) lets the user explore many possibilities in using a computer. Desktop animations, office applications, email clients, browsers, scientific applications, games, educational suites, multimedia authoring tools and other utilities are just some of the available software. Moreover, the Ubuntu community is very helpful in finding solutions for many problems. The availability of commercial support from Canonical adds more reliability for corporate desktops. “This move shows the Government of India’s interest in FOSS. It should be spread to all other states and departments. Apart from the cost of software, adaptation of FOSS will lead to low maintenance, freedom from vendor lock-in, access to tons of free open source applications, access to new devices, a highly secured environment, full support to all local languages, etc. The only hurdle may be resistance to the migration among new users. They have to relearn things like file-system architecture, installing applications and a few OpenOffice.org tricks. But this can be surmounted by proper training. In this case, they have been using Red Hat for the past four years, so it will be very easy for court staff members to migrate to Ubuntu. They will enjoy the stunning graphics, better performance and ease of operations. They can contact us for any kind of community support.”
Yogesh Girikumar, a Linux enthusiast “This is a very good move, a positive step in the right direction. The other government departments should take note of this, and should consider using Linux and Free Software as well. They need a good operating system that is inexpensive, has all the features they need, and that is easy to use. Ubuntu just happens to be the most popular distribution and the natural choice when it comes to people who have been using Windows for long. “The Ubuntu Desktop is not as enterprise-oriented as Red Hat is, and can be personalised according to any individual’s needs. And support for it is comparatively less expensive. Ubuntu delivers all the features that other enterprise operating systems offer, at a better bargain — and individuals might find it fun, easy to use, and not be intimidated by any fancy stuff. “Ubuntu provides good driver support. It is derived from Debian, which is known for its security. It provides good language support, a live CD mode, multimedia support, support for peripherals, and can do away with expensive anti-virus software. “The only disadvantage can be that some proprietary software that people may be familiar with, will not work with Linux, for example, Photoshop, CorelDraw, Illustrator, etc. If they have been using Microsoft Office 2007 or later, they would feel lost with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, because of the unfamiliar interface. So a little training might be required. “Since those in the Supreme Court have already been using Red Hat, as has been reported, the above points should not be a problem, except for maybe having to explain the few differences between Red Hat and Ubuntu. For example, Ubuntu uses ‘Software Centre’, which Red Hat does not have. And certain things are done differently. Each OS has its own idiosyncrasies.”

5 October 2011: The stage is set in Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, for the world’s cheapest tablet device to be launched. The audience, including students and media persons, are super excited. Camera angles are meticulously chosen to capture the best images. And then comes the much-awaited moment when Aakash, the Low Cost Access Device is unveiled…

The picture unfolds…

The 7-inch (17.8-cm) device features a resistive touch-screen, weighs 350 gm and includes 256 MB of RAM, a 32 GB expandable memory slot, and two USB ports. Running Android 2.2 “Froyo”, the tablet promises 2-3 hours of battery life with its 2100 mAh battery.

It also offers support for Wi-Fi connectivity, includes a microphone and stereo earphones, and features HD video streaming and playback. It supports file formats like DOC, DOCX, PDF and PPTX, among others. The tablet will be available with a 12-month replacement warranty. Other notable features include social networking, e-books, instant messaging, over 150,000 free applications, and 1,000 hours of free online lectures for students.

It, however, lacks access to the Android Marketplace. The device has been designed, developed and manufactured by UK-based Datawind Ltd, in partnership with IIT Rajasthan, under the HRD ministry’s National Mission on Education through Information & Communication Technology (NME-ICT).

Though it has a very modest 366 MHz processor (from Conexant), there is an HD video co-processor and graphics accelerator to improve performance. The retail version, which will be rolled out in November, will feature a faster 600 MHz processor from ST Micro, and will be priced slightly higher, at Rs 2,999.

The facts

Now for the real story. The device, which was positioned as “Made in India”, is basically assembled in India. Kuljeet Singh, director, Unique Mobinet Surfers Pvt Ltd (a distribution partner of Datawind), said, “We are getting the components from outside, but assembling them in India.”

He was unwilling to divulge any further details about the product.

The device includes 800 different components, which actually come from all over the world — 29 per cent of the components are from South Korea, 24 per cent from China, 16 per cent from India, 16 per cent from the US, and the rest from other parts of the world. Assembly is being done in Quad Electronic Solutions’ facility in Hyderabad.

A lukewarm reception

Technology experts reject the device completely. Some experts, who have reviewed Aakash, say that it’s a sheer waste of money, and not even good enough for students. The company (Datawind) is planning to launch the device in the retail space in November. After reading about the specs and the performance of the tablet, you might think twice about investing even this meagre amount in the device.

Datawind offers the tablet at a price of Rs 3,000 (approximately). What it calls a resistive touch-screen is an interface that is quite unresponsive, and not user friendly. Aakash runs on Android 2.2 “Froyo” instead of “Gingerbread”. The student edition of the device supports only Wi-Fi, and not 3G.

The report says that the company plans to launch a 3G model some time soon. However, with the two USB ports, users can get 3G connectivity with a 3G USB dongle, provided they’ve added support for it. Aakash comes preloaded with apps like “Documents to Go” and “arXiv Droid”, which enables users to browse articles on physics, maths, etc.

A major problem encountered while operating the device is that it heats up really quickly, even in an air-conditioned room. This can be attributed to the poor design and cheap components used in the device. The Aakash tablet reads pen drives, but the natively supported file formats are pretty limited. Reviews mention that the device is incapable of playing common formats like AVI and FLV on the stock player.

Users cannot install apps from the Android Marketplace, which is a big drawback. The battery life of the device (just 3 hours, approximately) is really poor. The internals of the device are even more disturbing. The components used can be purchased off-the-shelf, which is not really surprising, given that it was built by students, the report adds.

The troublesome part is the way the components are put together. The components and wires within the tablet are held in place by simple electrical tape. The quality of wires used appears to be cheap. Aakash uses a very flimsy and delicate chassis, so users will need to rely upon the pouch for the security of the device.

Aakash is simply a device designed by students, for students. It is not such a good investment for tech users. Aakash clearly underlines the fact that “cheap and cheerful” don’t necessarily add up to a good system.

Call for a cheaper device

Aakash has proven to be cheap in almost every way — be it the price of the device or the specs. After launching the world’s cheapest tablet PC at $35 (Rs 1,750 approx.) for students in India, the government is now working to make the device even cheaper — down to $10 (Rs 500 approx). HRD minister Kapil Sibal has invited technology providers, entrepreneurs and stakeholders across the world to come together to make a device for less than $10.

Will it really be worth it? Only time can tell.