Samartha Raghava Nagabhushanam, CEO, Aseema Softnet Technologies

Could you elaborate on Aseema’s open source offerings?

Aseema provides device engineering and ERP/CRM solutions for mobiles. A core area we are focusing on is segment-centric tablets that can be used in the retail, educational, medical and other specialised areas. For these tablets, we do the device engineering and the required applications according to the segment we are focusing on.

Android is often associated with mobile phones. Is there an increase in the use of Android on other platforms?

Android is seeping into many devices in sectors other than telecom. The doors in the electronics device segment are opening up for Android. It is used not only in phones and tablets, but even the electronics sector. However, Android is comparatively a new phenomenon and the industry started waking up to it only about two years back. Hence, the sudden increase in demand. Not many people have worked on this platform, and as a result, you see a rapid need for Android expertise.

Now, many organisations in India are building an extensive Android excellence centre. There is an acute scarcity of Android expertise globally in the non-telecom market and this is felt especially in India, because the global market looks to India for such solutions.

What are the sectors driving this demand?

The requirement for people with Android expertise is highest in the telecom sector, closely followed by the electronics industry. Backseat entertainment, retail dashboard activities, smart grid to optimise utilities, home entertainment, set-top boxes, television, etc, are also moving onto Android. It may take a while, but Android will also soon be available on home appliances.

Do you feel using Android can add value to the process of project development? If so, please state a few advantages of using Android platforms or technology tools?

Customers prefer to be connected with their devices all the time and Android is an apt operating system to connect to other devices over the Internet. Moreover, Android is associated with cost-effectiveness, and its real value lies in an extremely user-friendly growth. It is also reassuring to technologists that Google is a hidden parent for Android and that its framework does not allow fragmentation.

Is cost a significant reason for companies to adopt Android on their devices?

Yes, Android devices earlier cost $200 but are now available with the same features for $80. Using the Android OS reduces the cost of the device; Windows and Apple devices prove to be much more expensive. Moreover, proprietary operating systems are not flexible, as the source code is not available to developers.

Another reason why customers choose Android is because security is an important aspect of the device, and a lot of developers are building security around it in the form of apps. We have seen Android penetrate into defense organisations as well.

How many employees do you have at Aseema? Do you plan to hire Android experts in the near future?

Currently, we have about 25 employees, and around half of them have been trained to work on Android. We plan to hire many more in the next two years, to work on 20 devices concurrently. We will require about 10 to 20 people to work on designing each device, so the approximate number we are looking at hiring is 300.

What do you look for while choosing employees?

In our current team, we looked only for core programming skills in C language, as we knew people with Android skills were not available easily. We also look for analytical skills, so our tests are based on these two skills plus the candidate’s attitude in terms of eagerness to learn. We take the responsibility to hire, mentor and develop Android skills in the person.

How do you train your developers to work on Android?

Though we do not train employees, we allot even freshers to work on new devices and provide a mentor for them to learn from. An employee of good calibre takes approximately three months to learn the basics, and about six to ten months to be productive.

Do you involve developers from the community or take any help from them during project development?

Until now, we have been working on designing device solutions and so we did not get involved with the online community, because we were device-centric. We are also working on applications for our tablets and we plan to participate in the community by sharing some of our work and contributing code.

What is your message to the community and developer fraternity?

It is high time that non-telecom device engineers latch on to Android skills. In fact, this is the right time to be skilled in the Android domain, as there is a dearth of skills in this area and Android penetration is very rapid. It will be like Windows for PCs, which some people were slow to adopt, but eventually was embraced by all. Android will soon be an inevitable part of designing devices.

With so many content management systems around, where exactly do you position Drupal and how are you different?

Drupal is an interesting animal if you look at it closely. It powers two per cent of websites across the globe. But what is unique about Drupal is that it scales from large websites to really small websites. It runs blogging websites but it also runs large media companies’ websites. It is also unique in terms of its features and functionality. Because of the Drupal community, there are tens of thousands of people actively contributing to it. We have more than 10,000 modules. Because of this, we have actually arrived at a point where we can build almost any kind of website with Drupal.

That makes your question particularly interesting because you can use Drupal for blogging, in which case we may compete with WordPress, and you can also use Drupal for creating large corporate websites, in which case we tend to compete with the proprietary enterprise software solutions. At the same time, you can use Drupal for external collaboration websites. In this case, we compete with Jive. So Drupal is unique, and unlike any other platform, it is applicable to all these different formats.

There are a few areas where Drupal shines. One of them is media and entertainment, where we see a lot of Drupal adoption. Governments would be the second area. At least in the US and Europe, we see a lot of government websites that have switched to Drupal. The White House website runs on Drupal. And I would also say education is yet another prominent sector. Somebody did some research recently and looked at the .edu domain, which is for education websites in the US. The study said that 26 per cent of the websites in this domain were running Drupal. Another report that talked about the top 100 universities around the world said that 71 of them were using Drupal. So we believe Drupal has a lot of penetration in this sector as well.

How many people are working in Acquia, and how many from the community contribute to Drupal?

Let me talk about the contributors first. If you look at Drupal Core, which is the base platform, and Drupal 7, which is the current version — Drupal core accepts patches from thousands of people. Some contribute many patches while others contribute only one or two. I mentioned about almost 10,000 modules. Each of these modules is also being maintained by the developers, and in some cases, by a group of developers. And then there are people working on other functions like organising events… so if you combine all of these people, it is literally tens of thousands helping to build, promote and grow Drupal.

Acquia, which is my company, employs 160 people. All of us help to grow Drupal. As you can see, in a community with tens of thousands of people, 160 is a relatively small share. Having said that, we have a lot of influential people in our company and we try to assign our people where the most help is needed. As a company, we are very visible and prominent contributors to the Drupal community.

Who decides on the roadmap for Drupal: the community, Acquia, or both?

It’s primarily me in my role as a community lead. I opt for a collaborative approach when I take such a call. I talk about it to the community and the company members. I travel all around the world, as I have travelled to India. I listen to people, to developers, small end-users and large end-users and I try to get a good sense of where everybody wants Drupal to go. Then, I run these ideas through different media to get the feedback of the community, at large. So, it’s a collaborative effort to design the roadmap.

You just mentioned the White House website running Drupal. When the Obama administration took the decision to switch over to Drupal, it invited a lot of criticism from all parts of the world. You chose to remain quiet at that time. Any reasons?

The fact that they opted for Drupal is a huge testament for open source, and obviously for Drupal as well, because people usually doubt open source and Drupal for its scalability. A website like the White House gets hundreds and thousands of visitors on any given date — it’s a large-scale project.
The other question people ask is whether it is secure? The fact that the White House adopted Drupal a year-and-a-half ago, and the fact that it’s been running smoothly ever since, is again a great achievement for open source. It proves that open source is at least as secure as, if not more secure than, a proprietary CMS.

What do you mean when you say ‘as secure as, if not more secure than’?

Drupal is secure for a number of reasons. First, the open source development model. By the time I come at a patch in the Drupal Core, it’s not unusual that 20-30 more people have seen it already. This is extreme pre-review, which I don’t think you can find in any proprietary software company. In a proprietary firm, at best, you can get one other person that gets close. The other reason is that we have a dedicated security team. There are almost 30-40 people on the security team, which is a much larger number than any other proprietary software company.

The third reason is Drupal’s reach. Drupal is the base of almost 2 per cent of the websites of the world. A lot of government agencies are using Drupal. Because the source code is available, what happens is that for a lot of important projects, government agencies and entrepreneurs use Drupal and conduct a formal security audit on the source code. So if you look at it, Drupal is being audited more than anything else.

The entire domain of open source is under question when it comes to security, not just Drupal. Thousands of WordPress blogs have been hacked. Even the website of the Linux Foundation went down because of the attacks. Not that proprietary software is safe, but when it comes to open source, security becomes an issue. How do you defend that?

Well, one of the important things is: since WordPress and Drupal have such a large market share, this makes them a bigger target. Besides, Drupal has been adopted by the House of Representatives in the US and several defence agencies, so it continues to get checked and reviewed on a constant basis. Drupal’s adoption is accelerating when compared to the proprietary systems. In the Indian context, I have come to know that people do not like upgrading, which is one of our major issues. Whenever sites get hacked, it’s usually because people are not upgrading.

Open source projects, in general, are doing an excellent job. If people are not applying security fixes, they are bound to be targets. That’s usually what happens. Every software has security issues. Security teams can do the best job in the world by offering security fixes, but if the users are not upgrading, they are prone to being attacked. It’s up to the users to apply those fixes. For people who do not want to upgrade but focus on the content and building the actual features of the site, hosted solutions are a good answer. At Acquia, we have a solution called Drupal Gardens — basically, software as a service, and we apply the security fixes for you.

If a Drupal user comes across a bug, how does he get that fixed?

Everything we do in Drupal is open, so you have full visibility of what’s going on. Updates are made available at different levels. Very much like the Windows update or the Mac software update feature, Drupal will tell you when new versions of modules for Drupal code are available. We tell you which bugs have been fixed. So you know why you need to upgrade.

But then, if you do not want to wait for the official releases, you can go on the Drupal website. We have an open back-tracker, by which everyone can see all the bugs as well as the status of these bugs. So you can come to know if the bug has been fixed or not. If not, you can help fix it, of course. That is the USP of open source, where you can keep track of all these things.

How do you view Alfresco as a competitor?

We almost never compete with Alfresco. In fact, we usually work together with it. At the core, Alfresco is a document management repository used to manage documents, while Drupal is a content management system. Our document management component is pretty light-weight. Organisations with more sophisticated documents needs use Alfresco and Drupal together. Alfresco manages the documents, while Drupal manages the presentation, and brings a lot of features to these documents. We actually partner. We know their management team pretty well.

So, who are your competitors?

We consider a lot of CMSs as competition. In fact, Drupal as a platform can do many things. Some people use Drupal for blogging, like myself, and we compete with WordPress. At Acquia, we focus more on the enterprises. So there we take proprietary CMSs as our competitors.

Is there one CMS that you look up to, when it comes to improving Drupal?

I think we like to learn from all these CMSs. Frankly, we have learnt from WordPress, and similarly, they have learnt a lot from us. In the open source community, I won’t say we are competing. I think we are all fighting the same battle against the proprietary software vendors. We keep learning from each other. I am good friends with the Joomla leadership and the WordPress leadership, so we share notes and our opinions on building the community. We have a lot of communication with the open source community.

How easy is it to integrate Drupal with other open source projects?

It depends on the other project, to be honest. There are a lot of integration modules available. In some cases, it may be as easy as enabling modules and configuring both systems. If a module is available, it might be very easy. It also depends on the complexity of what you want to achieve and the complexity of the other system.

You have said that if you were to start Drupal from scratch today, you would do it for the mobile rather than the desktop. Any reasons in particular, or is it just that the growing market of mobiles attracts you?

When I started Drupal about 11 years ago, there wasn’t really a mobile market. Laptops were very fancy things at that time, which is kind of a mobile device in a way. But now with hand-held devices like the mobile phone, it’s a completely new world.

Any modern CMS needs to be able to work in this multi-device world. Drupal actually does a pretty good job there. Through modules, you can do pretty much everything you want. Like there is an HTML5 module, which will change the Drupal output to HTML5. Then there are Web services modules, which enable you to build mobile applications that can run on the phone.

The reason for my statement is that, I believe, tablets and mobile phones are the future. They will be bigger consumers of websites than desktops. The other reason is that I wanted to be a little controversial to get the community to embrace the mobile, because in Drupal 8, the next version of Drupal, it’s going to be our biggest theme — just like usability was the biggest theme in Drupal 7. I want mobile devices to be the big thing in Drupal 8. So, this was more of a wake-up call to say, “Hey, this is what is coming up next.”

An insight into Durpal 8

So, what is ‘Drupal for mobile’ going to be like?

The most interesting thing about the mobile is that it’s many different things to many different people. For some people, it’s being able to experience a regular website on a phone. So for that, we need to do HTML5, because some of the features of HTML5 allow you to optimise that experience. It also means responsive design, like images that will scale based on the screen size. It also means you need to do device discovery. So it’s a long list of check-boxes.

On the flip side, for some people the mobile means native applications that run on iOS or on Android. For those things, we need a completely different set of technologies. When I say we need to do mobile, I really mean we need to do all of that. So we are evolving the Drupal architecture and we are extending its feature sets, so that Drupal can truly become one of the de facto platforms for building mobile applications. It means we have to do a lot of different things.

When are you coming up with it?

We don’t know yet. If I were to guess, I would say a year-and-a-half to two years from now. It’s a rough guess. The reason I don’t know yet is because I want Drupal 7 to take its time. I want it to be a default release. It’s gradually getting there. I want everybody to be comfortable with Drupal 7. I want all of the Drupal talent to really truly understand Drupal 7. So, I want the entire ecosystem, the entire community to fully embrace Drupal 7 before we even set a date for Drupal 8.

So, being really mobile-ready will be the highlight of version 8. Any other focus areas?

Drupal 8 will focus on a number of things. The No. 1 thing would be the mobile, as mentioned earlier. It will also bring along configuration management, which is important for a lot of large organisations. It allows them to better manage configuration changes. Drupal 8 will have more usability improvements as it’s important for both small and large users. Some enterprise features will be added to make it attractive for large organisations, for better management of their Drupal sites.

Drupal can make big money…

You said Drupal can be a big business. If you could please elaborate…

Drupal started off as a project and it is evolving now to become an industry. There are hundreds of Drupal shops all around the world. Together, it means millions of dollars. That’s what I meant when I said it can be a big business. I see it growing even more. I think it can be a multi-billion dollar industry. I would like it to grow from two per cent of the Web to hopefully ten or more per cent of the Web. For this, we need to grow the entire ecosystem. Hence, trips like these will be required.

What is the business model of Acquia?

When I started Acquia, the initial thought was to make the company supportive to Drupal as Red Hat is for Linux. We started off with the Acquia Network, just like the Red Hat Network or the JBoss network. The Acquia Network gives you commercial support with service level agreements as well as access to a number of electronic services like performance monitoring — exactly the way the Red Hat model works.

However, we quickly discovered that there are additional products that we wanted to build. So, today we have three products. Acquia Network remains the main source of revenue. The second is Acquia Cloud, a scalable hosting solution. We are able to dynamically scale Drupal websites across many servers. In addition to the elasticity, we have also developed a lot of tools that help you manage Drupal websites; so you get source-code-management tools, and you get development staging and production environments. So it’s a complete solution to help you manage Drupal sites, from hosting to development tools, to support. And then we have Drupal Gardens, software as a service, which is a fully hosted solution. It is targeted at enterprises that want to build micro-sites, and small and medium enterprise businesses. So these are the three products.

And then we have a consulting practice as well, where we do architecture advice, security audits, performance scalability audits and training. Training is a big issue, particularly in India, where we have found a lot of interest from the community.

All these deployments in India or in the US are through partners, or does Acquia do them itself?

We, as a company, don’t build websites ourselves. We always work with partners. Sometimes the partners come to us with a lead, like, “Here is a customer and we would like you to be involved in providing some expert services.” Sometimes, customers come to us, and we go and find the partners, depending upon the need. We basically do the match-making in these cases.

For some of the customers, the location of the partner is not important, but their specifications are primary. In that case, we keep in mind their demands and find them a suitable partner with the defined expertise. Like in some cases, the customers want to have partners who have done a lot of government projects — while for others, the requirement may be that the partner should have an office in their base city. Whatever the case may be, we find them the right partner, depending upon their demands.

So, essentially, we have partners involved in the website building. We have over 300 partners around the world. We intend to expand the partner network considerably next year, not just in India, but in other countries around the world. We get a good number of queries on our website from customers, which we pass on to our partners to be attended to.

Drupal and India…

How do you plan to expand your training program in India?

We have already been doing some training in India. One of the reasons for this trip is to understand the state of Drupal in India and what the needs of the community here are. One of the things we have discovered from the interactions we had is the strong desire for training, both from small Drupal shops and the large SIs. Everybody has expressed a desire to get expert training in Drupal. We work with a lot of training partners as well. We have a lot of small Drupal shops. We have found that the demand for trained Drupal professionals does not match the supply at all.

So do you offer a certification course for Drupal?

Right now, we have some full-time staff at Acquia to build and maintain the training curriculum. We provide expert training in all Drupal aspects. We are using that training material and sharing it with all our partners. We are also training the trainers effectively. We help our partners impart that training, because we feel it is more scalable and that’s how we can reach thousands of Drupal people. We do not have any formal certification in place, but I think that it is only a matter of time before either we do that as a company, or someone else from the community does it. At some point of time, the demand for Drupal and its adoption will be so large that this will become a necessity.

So how do you plan to scale up training in India?

If you look at North America and Europe, Drupal basically grew there for two reasons. First, a lot of developers and engineers working for bigger organisations started organising Drupal meetups and camps. That’s one of the things I would want to promote here. One of the main reasons of this trip is that we want to help people organise these camps. We are also trying to take the “top-to-down approach”. We are meeting up with the partners and exploring possibilities as to how can they take it up more effectively. We already have 8-10 stronger partners and we are also working with larger SIs. Some of them are doing architecture work, development work and training. So we already have 2-3 training partners in India.

Have you set any target regarding how many people you plan to train in a given period?

We are here to gauge how big the domain really is. We would like to work with as many Indian partners as possible. Clearly, there is a demand for thousands of trained Drupal professionals. Now we have to see how to cater to that kind of demand. This is the reason why Drupal training in India is so important. The biggest challenge is to find Drupal developers and trained Drupal professionals. This is one of the biggest hindrances for the growth of Drupal adoption in India, so there is a huge opportunity for every engineer in India to get involved in Drupal.

What did you like most about the open source community in India and what do you find lacking here?

First, I have had some great experiences with the community in India. While in Delhi, we expected a hundred people and almost 250 showed up, which is awesome. It shows that there is real interest in Drupal and a passion amongst the people for open source. Yet another thing worth talking about is that, for the first time, 10 or more Drupal companies from Delhi came together. They got an opportunity to share their best practices. The positive thing is that they are starting to come together as a community. I have seen such a scenario before — that’s why I know what the result of this will be. I am very excited to see the early momentum of the community.

Might sound like a really strange question, but I’m just curious — how many visits do you see from India on drupal.org?

Last time I checked, which has been a couple of months ago, Indians were actually the second biggest group of visitors to the Drupal website. I am sure they still are. The first group was North Americans. The Indian traffic for Drupal continues to grow, which is one of the major reasons why we are here. We saw the interest from the Drupal community.

What about Drupal’s physical presence in India?

With this visit, we will gauge the temperature of Drupal in India. We will take some time to decide whether we need a presence in India or if our presence will help the Drupal community in some way. We have understood so far that it will clearly help if we have some people in India.

Google has recently launched a service where it facilitates SMEs. The company plans to develop about 500,000 websites for SMEs in India. Users just need to go to an online location, where they can create their website in three simple steps. Does this kind of a format, coming from a giant, pose a challenge for Drupal?

It’s hard to tell what its impact will be, right now. I have heard about it but not tried it. But I can imagine it allows you to create pretty basic websites. I think where Drupal will shine is in building more sophisticated and feature-rich websites. A lot of SMEs will actually find that at some point in time, they would like to use all of those features.

The Google platform is good to bring people onto the Web, to get them to see and feel the initial benefits of the Web — but I guess at some point, they would want more. And hopefully, once they want more, they would naturally be attracted to Drupal. So I am not sure if I can call this competition for Drupal. In a way it is, but at the same time it will also introduce so many people to the Web, who can later resort to Drupal. So I think it will eventually be a benefit for Drupal.

India already has 100 million Internet users. I see it as an opportunity for Drupal to flourish in India. And also, Drupal has never been good for minimal websites. People never use Drupal to build a five-page static website. So I believe it could be quite an opportunity for us.

Dries & Open Source…

What do you think of open source as an individual?

Every piece of my body strongly believes in open source. I think open source is a better development model. I think open source is an opportunity to disrupt a lot of software technologies, specifically those which I would describe as commodity technologies, for example, websites. There are millions of websites and I think open source can be a real game-changer. The other example is operating systems. Millions of people use operating systems. Because of its reach, I think open source can be very disruptive. That’s been proven with Linux, obviously.

As far as proprietary software is concerned, it will always exist, especially in certain niche areas. Like if it’s a project amongst 100 people, it will not be feasible to apply the open source development model to such a project. Open source matters where there is scalability involved.

Yet the market share of open source is pretty small. What exactly hinders the growth of open source technologies?

I think it depends on how you measure things. Like in the mobile space, open source definitely has much more of a role in the form of Android. But it usually comes down to marketing, frankly. The typical open source community is good at engineering solutions but doesn’t necessarily have the same marketing strength. Marketing is really required to help push the technology to the masses. With time and the advent of technology, I see the fear of security subsiding and this will give open source a much-desired boost. It will get accelerated in the next three years.

What are the real challenges in the implementation of open source technology and how can one overcome them?

Things like documentation come to my mind when I try to look for so-called drawbacks. I think open source projects don’t always have good documentation. It depends on the stage of the projects also. Bigger projects have documentation but when it comes to small open source projects, the documentation is clearly an issue.

Few criticisms… & fact checks

Is Drupal difficult for users?

Drupal has a bit of a reputation of being hard to use, as compared to WordPress, Joomla and other enterprise solutions. That criticism is, in a way, correct — and we have worked on it too. Starting from Drupal 7, we have tried to simplify things. It is much easier to use now, but this does not mean we will stop in our efforts. We will continue to invest in usability. Drupal 8 will be an answer. We want to lower the barrier.

Does Drupal hate changes?

No, not at all. It’s funny, because Drupal enjoys the reputation of being a CMS that changes the most. As compared to WordPress and Joomla, we change backward compatibility. We are always changing our APIs and our architecture. In Drupal 7, we made so many fundamental architectural changes. Unlike any other open source CMS, we embrace change.

Is Drupal disorganised?

Well, I think all open source projects are — and that’s the beauty of open source! I think it’s the nature of the beast, as all open source projects have thousands of volunteers all around the world. It’s pretty hard to organise those numbers of people. I think this is a strength because there are people always working on Drupal and improving it. It’s a huge advantage, but it’s also an interesting challenge. But I don’t say it’s a bad challenge. It’s a fun kind of a challenge. It looks like chaos, but the creativity that comes out of it is really amazing. The fact that it is disorganised makes it accessible.

Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader

Please tell us a little about your own introduction to open source — and your journey so far in this domain…

I was introduced to open source software by a friend while I was a university student. The more I looked at it, the more I found I was able to use it to solve various problems. Later on I learned more about the philosophy of free software and the principles of open source.

When did you join Red Hat and what kind of projects have you worked on there?

I joined Red Hat in July 2010. My job at Red Hat is to lead the Fedora community. On a day-by-day basis that means making sure that Fedora is advancing forward, ensuring that communications are strong between the various groups within Fedora, helping to mediate when conflicts happen, and making sure that Red Hat continues to give the Fedora community the respect and resources it deserves.

I act as a conduit between the Fedora Community and Red Hat to make sure that both sides understand the
other’s concerns.

What has your contribution been to the Fedora Project?

I’ve been a user of Fedora since it split from Red Hat Linux but it wasn’t until the past four years or so that I really started to become an active contributor. Most of my early contributions were the testing of pre-releases and bug reporting. Then I joined the Fedora Documentation Team and helped out with writing documentation, improving the workflow, and helping the team move to newer tools. I have helped to set up some VoIP services for Fedora. I’ve also spoken at various Fedora events on a range of topics.

As the project leader, what are the key goals that you have set for the project and what kind of best practices have you brought into the product development cycle?

As the Fedora Project Leader, I’ve tried to focus on what is of the most strategic importance to the project. I’ve worked with the Fedora Board to create a vision statement for our project, which is: “The Fedora Project creates a world where free culture is welcoming and widespread, collaboration is common-place, and people control their content and devices.”

Our vision statement sets our long-term intentions for the project, but we also have short-term goals we’re working on as well. We’re focused on making the communications within our community better, as well as making the Fedora community a more welcoming environment for those who might be joining us for the first time.

What are the significant recent developments in the Fedora project?

Fedora continues to be a pioneer in technical innovation. Each release brings the latest of what’s new in free and open source software. Fedora 16 delivers the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop environment (with several alternative desktops available as well), better integration with the systemd initialisation system, several updated tools for virtualization and cloud computing, as well as technical previews of the BTRFS filesystem and Java 7.

We’ve also made developments on the human side of our community. We continue to increase the number of Fedora events held every year, including our Fedora Activity Days (known as FADs) and our Fedora User and Developers’ Conference (known as FUDCon). This year we’ve had four FUDCon events — one in North America in January, one in Latin America in May, one in Europe in October, and one in India, in November.

In addition to FUDCons and FADs, we’ve had Fedora Ambassadors represent Fedora at dozens of
events around the globe.

It has been reported that Fedora 16 “…has better offerings, benefits and technology than Fedora 15, which was released 6 months ago.” Could you tell us what is “better” in Fedora 16?

Fedora 15 shipped with the GNOME 3.0 desktop, which while innovative, still had a few rough edges. Fedora 16 ships with the GNOME 3.2 desktop, which offers quite a number of improvements over the earlier version, including online accounts, a new contact manager, and a new document manager. It also offers a new on-screen keyboard.

In addition to the desktop changes, we’ve also updated a number of internal items in Fedora 16. For example, in Fedora 15 we moved to the systemd initialisation system, but it wasn’t running very many of the services using native systemd unit files. In Fedora 16, we converted the majority of the core services to using native systemd configuration files.

Red Hat stated that, “India is a hot-bed for open source community development, and is second only to the USA in open source contributions to the Fedora project.” Please share a few specific details on the quality of contributions and other observations regarding the Indian community that contributes to the Fedora project.

Our user and contributor base in the Indian subcontinent is very active in Fedora and continues to grow and develop at an amazing pace. In November, we held a Fedora Users’ and Developers’ Conference (FUDCon) in Pune, India with more than 500 attendees, making this the largest conference ever.

Fedora contributors from India help in all aspects of the development process, including writing code, packaging software, testing, writing documentation, doing translation and internationalisation, artwork and design, and marketing.

Jared Smith with the attendies at FUDCon 2011 at Pune, India (Photo by Kushal Das – liveshowsphotos.com)

Based on your experience and interaction with the Indian community, what are your observations related to India’s FOSS ecosystem?

From what I’ve observed during my time here, India appears to have a very strong FOSS ecosystem. The
focus on high-tech jobs and the willingness to work hard, combined with the high costs of proprietary software, make FOSS a perfect fit. I’m sure we’ll continue to see very strong adoption of FOSS in India.

Fedora releases are known for missing deadlines. Any reasons why this trend continues?

While Fedora attempts to stick to its schedule, the important thing to note is that Fedora releases are criteria-based releases not time-based releases. We purposely put a checkpoint into our schedule at the time of Alpha, Beta, and Final release so that our quality assurance can test to ensure the releases meet all of the release criteria. If a particular release doesn’t meet all of the criteria, we would rather delay the schedule by a week and try again rather than release a product that doesn’t meet our quality standards.

In the last few years, Linux has consolidated its stake in the server market. However, there’s some way to go when it comes to the desktop adoption of Linux distributions. What are the key reasons behind this and do you see this trend reversing anytime soon?

Various people have been prognosticating the “Year of the Linux Desktop” for quite a number of years
now, and yet we still haven’t seen it. I think there are a number of reasons for this, including the entrenched position of the dominant players in traditional desktop operating systems and applications.

As more and more applications move from a desktop-centric model to a Web-based model, I think we’ll continue to see small but consistent gains in desktop adoption of Linux.

Are you planning to make Fedora 16 popular on the desktop front?

We always try to make Fedora appealing to tech-savvy desktop users. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen great strides being made in most of the desktop environments supported in Fedora. We’ve also worked to integrate the various pieces of the desktop environment to help provide for a more cohesive experience between applications.

Involvement with other projects

Apart from Fedora, which are the other key global open source projects to which you have contributed?

Earlier in my career, I made quite a number of contributions (both in terms of documentation, code and evangelism) to Asterisk, the most popular open source telecommunications platform. I’ve also made patches for a number of other programs and contributed quite a number of bug reports to myriad open source projects.

Please share a few details about your book Asterisk, The Future of Telephony. How is the future of telephony likely to evolve and what role will the open source technology stack play in this evolution?

After starting the Asterisk Documentation Project and successfully writing quite a bit of good Asterisk documentation, two friends (Leif Madsen and Jim VanMeggelen) and I decided to write a book on Asterisk. At the time, we subtitled the book The Future of Telephony. Since then, open source telephony has exceeded even my wildest expectations and now powers a very significant portion of the new telephone systems installed today. Leif and Jim have gone on to write a follow-up to the book but it no longer says “The Future of Telephony” because the future is squarely here now.

Apart from technology, what are your other interests and how do they help you in your pursuits as the Fedora Project Leader?

I know some people are drawn to a very charismatic leader for their project, but I like to think of myself as an ordinary person outside of the world of free and open source software. My other interests include reading, hiking, spending time with my family, and singing in a church choir. I’ve also recently taken up photography and am slowly getting to the point where I’m not completely embarrassed to post some photos online.

Could you share a few insights regarding the cutting-edge technology projects in the Linux space that are currently under way? What is your involvement with them?

I don’t have the time these days to spend much time programming, but I do see myself as a catalyst to help drive development in other ways. I try to help get the right people sharing ideas, help the next generation of developers learn the tools and skills they’ll need, and inspire people to take a more active role in the future of free software.

On adoption and the money in FOSS

Often people say that while open source solutions are available at a low cost or for free, the support cost or the service engineers hired to run the show are a scarce resource, and the overall costs of running the IT infrastructure on open source solutions is ultimately higher than the proprietary solutions. What is your take on this perception?

You could argue that the overall costs of an administrator who understands open source might be slightly more expensive. My own experiences have shown that open source administrators scale better. Just as one piece of anecdotal evidence — I previously worked at a company where we had a staff of six or seven full-time administrators managing over 6,500 Linux servers and all the related networking. At the same company, we had four or five full-time administrators managing the company’s dozen Windows servers. I don’t expect everyone’s experience to be the same as mine, but I don’t give much credence to the notion that the total cost of ownership is higher for free/open source solutions.

There is a view that it is difficult to make money around FOSS. What is your take on this?

Of course it’s difficult to make money around FOSS. I’d argue that it’s difficult to make money around software in general, and doubly so in FOSS because you have to go out and prove your value every single day.

You don’t get to take short-cuts or play marketing tricks to convince people to buy the latest version of your software. The transparency in FOSS means any one of your competitors can see what you do and how you do it and try to do it better. There’s no “secret sauce”.

That being said, there are a number of profitable open source companies that are successful because they understand the dynamics of FOSS and consistently prove their value day after day. I consider myself very privileged to have been able to work for two such companies over the past few years.

What would be your advice to young FOSS professionals who want to build businesses or careers around FOSS?

I think it’s naive to think that a future employer won’t search for your name on the Internet before calling you in for a job interview. What better way is there to impress your future boss than to have your name out there associated with development of code you are passionate about and working as part of a team?

FOSS in software development

What are the advantages of working on open platforms and using open source tools for software development? What key advantages does the open source stack offer vis-a-vis the proprietary ones, in relation to: individual developers/programmers as well as software product development teams or organisations.

Software developers are problem solvers by nature. They enjoy the art of seeing a problem, planning a solution, and writing code that solves the problem. At the same time, they get annoyed at anything that gets in the way of trying to solve the problem. Free and open source tools give developers the transparency to dive into problems that they wouldn’t be able to tackle in a proprietary “black-box” solution. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen developers wish they could somehow fix a problem in a proprietary compiler or library.

For organisations and teams, it’s even more vital, because as the size of the teams grows, so does the level of communication required to keep people up to date with the latest information. My own experience has been that in proprietary software teams, any given piece of code might get reviewed by two or three people, if you’re lucky. In open source projects, that number tends to be much higher. And, even if you’re using open source tools to build proprietary software, the ability to get lower-level insight into how the tools are working — and the flexibility to change them — keeps programmers productive.

Are there any pitfalls when working on open source platforms? If so, how can these be dealt with?

Sure. Open source isn’t always the most efficient software development model. It just happens to be the only one I’ve found that is sustainable over the long run. Obviously, the other potential issue with open source platforms is that because people have a voice in how the software is developed, you tend to see a lot of heated discussions between people who are very passionate about the software they are working on but have differing opinions. Unfortunately, the tone of these discussions often scares off the very people who are willing to help make the software better.

You have been an avid speaker at many FOSS events. Which are the subjects that particularly interest you — the ones that you would like to advocate to the audiences you address?

Yes, I very much enjoy speaking at FOSS events and getting the opportunity to meet people who put tremendous effort and time into free and open source software. What I most often try to instil in those who listen to my talks is to be bold in your efforts to change the world, but be humble enough to realise that others have the knowledge that might help you in your quest.

Another point I’ve been talking about lately is the fact that FOSS isn’t getting as much buzz as it did a decade ago. I explain that this is a very healthy sign because it means FOSS is now so commonplace that people don’t need to highlight it as something odd or as the “shiny new object”. The task before us is to continue on with the same level of enthusiasm, even though we might not be getting as much attention around our efforts.

Are there many challenges that open source developers may have shared with you at such events?

There are always going to be challenges and problems. Smart people will be passionate about their software, sometimes even to a fault. Companies will try to use shortcuts to gain money at the expense of FOSS users and developers. In the end, however, I’m very optimistic about the future. We’ve already begun to see the fruits of our labour, and things are only going to get better in the years to come.

Summing up…

We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux this year. You also have been an early adopter of Linux and FOSS. How would you recapitulate this journey, and how do you see Linux and open source evolving?

I see the evolution of Linux and FOSS as a journey of hope and opportunity. Linux started out small and inconspicuous and look how far it has come now. I remember in the early days of FOSS, a lot of effort was put into duplicating the functionality of existing proprietary systems. Today, FOSS is pioneering work in a vast array of different areas and we are the ones pioneering the trail to the future.

What is your message to LINUX For You readers (primarily Linux and open source enthusiasts comprising newbies, power users, developers and sysadminis)?

My message to your readers would be to be bold and make the decision to take a more active role in at least one FOSS project over the next month. It doesn’t have to be writing code — it could be writing documentation, doing testing, submitting a bug report, helping with translation or internationalisation. It could even be doing artwork, design, marketing or any number of other things.

All you need to do is be bold. Stop being passive about FOSS. Don’t be afraid to take that first small step. Then put your other foot in front of the first and you will find joy in the journey. There is a world of opportunity awaiting you.

Ramandeep Singh, CEO, Calsoft Labs

Do you feel that India is rich in open source skills? Is that one of the reasons Alten has set up a base in India?

A few years ago, people would approach only the US when they required expertise in FOSS, but now, India has been added to the list. Earlier, they approached India as it came across as cost-effective, but in recent years, they have been coming to India to tap the skills of efficient FOSS professionals. There is a shortage of FOSS skills in Europe, while people here are more aware of FOSS.

Does this have anything to do with the education provided here?

Popular belief is that education in open source is better in the US. However, FOSS is something you learn while you work, and your skills will be based on your experience. Indians have been getting more opportunities to train in a stack and evolve into experts.

Do you think there has been an increase in the demand for FOSS professionals over the recent years?

Yes, the whole world is moving towards Linux. Open source has been around since the 90s but the demand for FOSS has definitely picked up since 2008. In the past two years, especially, India and the US have witnessed a change in how organisations look at FOSS solutions.

Are your clients open to open source solutions? How has their outlook towards FOSS changed?

Linux is coming to industries where FOSS was earlier forbidden because of limited support. Now, it is the reverse.

Clients consider FOSS, as it provides better assurance of support. Business sectors like aerospace and the automotive industry are including open source solutions to a large extent in their testing and development. When it comes to fixed-price projects, we are often given the freedom to decide the technical environment and methodology, and we immediately opt for FOSS. The clients are happy if the end solution serves their purpose. For instance, if we are setting up an IP stack, the starting point will unquestionably be open source, as it is a mature and established solution.

A few years ago, we would evaluate the advantages and disadvantages, but now this is out first choice, unless the client specifies other requirements.

How do FOSS platforms or tools add value to project development? What are their advantages over proprietary solutions?

To begin with, there is an online community working on open source. If you need any help, the community will back you with its library and by making portions of code available. It is also easier in terms of maintenance, and the ability to find corrections. We find that Linux offers more support than proprietary tools. Moreover, we cannot forget the difference in costs. When compared with proprietary solutions, FOSS solutions turn out to be much lower in cost.

What are the key open source tools that your company uses for product development? On what products has it been used?

In embedded product engineering, we are doing several projects on Linux and Android. In the networking space, we have active engagements where we are using OpenFlow and OpenNMS. In the software product engineering space, we work on Linux (Ubuntu) and leverage a number of open source tools. We use scripting languages like PHP and Python; the Java programming language; MySQL and PostgreSQL databases; Apache and Apache Tomcat Web servers; JBoss and GlassFish application servers; Eclipse, Netbeans and Komodo Edit IDEs; Ant and Maven build tools; applications like PHPMyAdmin, XAMPP, SVN and Firebug; Hibernate ORM, and frameworks like jQuery, Zend, CakePHP, Spring MVC, Struts, JSF and GWT.

How many open source professionals work at your organisation currently?

About 150 engineers at Calsoft Labs are working actively on open source technologies in development and/or testing. We are likely to add another 75 to 100 engineers with experience in leveraging open source tools and technologies in product engineering, within the next 12-18 months.

What skills do you look for while recruiting employees?

We look for general as well as open source skills in multimedia, digital television, communication systems, 3D frameworks, program management, networking stacks and video processors.

Do you train your employees in open source?

Yes, we absorb students from NITs and other top-tier schools as freshers. They have to undergo an on-the-job training for six to eight months. We let them handle a portion of the customers’ projects, so that they get not just theoretical, but actual knowledge of the subject as well.

Do you interact with the online open source community?

Many of our senior employees contribute to the community on a regular basis. We also take help from the community and do adaptations, corrections and take feedback on projects from the community.

Do you also share your open source work with them?

Heavy-duty open source users are some of the community’s biggest contributors. There is no rule that the organisation imposes on its employees, but they do contribute to the community themselves. However, the portion of the project we share is limited, as our clients may have confidentiality issues. For example, if we have developed a stack for a security application, we share only the work that we have done on open source. We also share the libraries we develop and the routines necessary for the project; but we keep the addons to ourselves.

When do you think organisations should opt for FOSS solutions?

FOSS is great when you have to get your projects done quicker, as a client expects a commitment of quality, reliability and security within the given period. If you find that the area you’re working in has the FOSS community’s support, your project can be developed quicker using FOSS. There is an issue of IP as well. If the client has specific views on IP, you may prefer to stick to proprietary options.

What is your message to the growing number of FOSS developers and to the community?

Young developers are the mainstay of the FOSS community. This market will grow substantially, and the adoption of FOSS will also continue to grow. Soon, FOSS will constitute a large percentage of the market. This is a great place to be in and grow today.

Rudramuni started his Linux career with Red Hat Linux 3. Apart from being responsible for the smooth running of operations across Dell's R&D initiatives in India, he is also responsible for multiple operating system technologies for the enterprise market, and out-of-band systems management technologies for enterprise data centres.

It has been a decade since the Dell India R&D Centre began operations. Could you tell us about the key milestones it has crossed?

Rudramuni B: The Dell India R&D Centre started with a small team of just two or three people, to test Dell Enterprise machines. It has been a decade, and now the team has grown to nearly 700 members. All enterprise operating systems are delivered out of Bengaluru.

The organisation now plays a very important role in key decision-making for all operating system offerings in the enterprise market segment.

For instance, the launch of RHEL 7 is eight quarters away from now, but our team has already started working with Red Hat and Fedora teams on the feature list and product road maps of RHEL 7.

Dell India R&D works on several systems management offerings, including Open Manage, Microsoft SCOM-based management solutions, change management and deployment solutions, enterprise cluster solutions, and solutions to manage virtual infrastructure. These solutions are architected, designed, developed and tested out of Bengaluru. All these offerings are very critical to Dell’s enterprise business.

The Bengaluru centre delivers all online and offline documentation for Dell’s entire product range, including desktops, laptops, netbooks, smartphones, servers, storage, etc. In short, we have complete ownership over the programs we work on. We take a call on matters like deciding the flavour of the operating system to be supported on Dell enterprise-class hardware; the design and development of systems management software; and the development of customised enterprise solutions. This shift in ownership indicates the growth in maturity and stability of the management and technology teams in Bengaluru.

Does the centre also handle consumer products?

RB: No, this centre focuses only on enterprise-related hardware, software, systems management and solutions engineering. The consumer products are handled by our design centre in Austin, Texas.

What are the roles and responsibilities of the Dell India R&D Centre?

RB: This centre has a variety of roles and responsibilities to deliver to various software programs:

• The operating system and hypervisor division is led by Jagadeesh, and they make sure that all Dell enterprise-class hardware runs smoothly with popularly available operating systems and hypervisors.
• The systems management group designs and develops applications and tools to monitor performance, and conduct systems diagnostic tests about the general health of the servers. For example, if a system is about to fail due to fluctuations in temperature caused by fan failure, the systems management software will take appropriate action to forewarn the systems administrator.
  Systems management can be either in-band or out-of-band. The Dell India R&D Centre owns the design and is responsible for the development of an in-band product called “OpenManage” that performs all activities including monitoring, deployment and change management.
  The Centre also delivers the connections to manage heterogeneous environments. Three years ago, Dell came up with the concept of out-of-band management using iDRAC, which is an enhanced version of embedded Linux ported on the motherboard. It acts as a remote access controller, and has a CPU and memory that is different from the host.
• The Dell India R&D Centre is also architecting and designing cutting-edge solutions to effectively manage virtual infrastructures.
• The Centre also works on cluster computing by connecting multiple boxes in various cloud environments. Apart from the above, the Dell India R&D Centre performs various testing activities, which are developed by other global teams at Taipei or Austin.
• Besides, documentation of all Dell products is done out of the Bengaluru centre, in over 30 languages. This includes technical documents of various products, and user manuals for our products.

How important is an ISV (independent software vendor) for Dell?

RB: ISVs are of importance to us at a global level, although in India, we have just started the initiative. Let’s see how it goes. ISVs can contact us at TechnologyPartnerRegistrationRequest_AT_Dell_DOT_com.

Does Dell also take the help of its partners and ISVs for large-scale deployments?

RB: Yes, we work closely with Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Microsoft, VMWare and many such partners. Dell not only plays a significant role in the product development life cycle of our partners, but also brings a lot of revenue benefits to our partners, in terms of licence and subscription sales as an OEM partner.

We also have global ISV programmes, under which multinational companies like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc., partner with us. Even niche ISVs, which can make a considerable change to SMBs in India, can collaborate with us. We have recently started an ISV programme, under which any firm can be our ISV, provided it has created an interesting application that solves either a large or very specific problem set faced by our customers.

We explore ways to collaborate, and we also undertake a study on how the solution behaves on Dell servers, storage systems and networks.

What have you observed about the adoption of Linux and open source in the overall market? What’s your take on the reservations some firms have regarding Linux and adopting open source — that these are risky for running mission/business-critical applications?

RB: I do not see a risk in using Linux for mission-critical projects. However, customers are divided in two different sets. One comprises the early technology adopters, who are the first to take risks. If everything works fine, they enjoy a longer life cycle with the product, and keep updating and innovating when better technologies come up. On the other hand, there are late adopters, who trust products only after seeking endorsement from various case studies, and are not interested in regular upgrades or experimentation, as long as the product runs fine.

What has your experience been with Linux and open source?

RB: I started my career with SVR 3.2 and SVR4 UNIX and used it on a multi-CPU kernel. The stability of Linux now is much better compared to how it was about five years ago. We know for sure that it is only going to get stronger in the years to come — not only because of the commitment of the open source community, but also due to the engagement of various commercial Linux vendors and hardware vendors.

The factory shipment of Windows OS is still higher, but we can’t precisely estimate how many customers use Windows or Linux on Dell’s PowerEdge servers, because various flavours of Linux are freely available, and customers are free to install and run them. Our key objective is for our hardware to run fine with the majority of them.

All of us, as IT professionals, have the technical knowledge and experience to solve our customers’ pain points. The open source community is a great forum to collaborate with, to find solutions together, and fuel some great innovations.

Let us commit to give back as much free software as we consume.

Do you offer any India-centric open source products?

RB: We currently have no open source-centric products targeted towards the Indian market. However, at Dell, we regularly interact with customers in India. Maybe there are specific needs within Linux for Indian customers, to effectively solve issues related to electricity voltage fluctuations, dusty environments, etc. Localisation of operating systems, which is very relevant to India, is taken care of by our Linux partners.

How does Dell contribute to open source?

RB: The Dell India R&D Centre team contributes to different open source programs through code submission. We propose enhancements to different subsystems of the operating system, and also decide how it will be implemented. For example, to solve an industry-wide problem of the NIC naming mechanism in enterprise Linux, our engineers conceptualised the new network device-naming convention. We worked with the Linux community to make sure that it gets completely accepted by them and becomes a part of the mainline upstream Linux kernel.

This “Biosdevname” solution, proposed and owned by Dell, created an industry-standard method to name network cards based on their physical location in the server, rather than a generic sequential order. The project included the creation of a new ACPI standard and SMBIOS extensions, and is accepted in the mainline Linux kernel. As of today, this solution has been included in new versions of Red Hat, SUSE, etc.

We have been contributing in terms of various subsystems including networks, device drivers, systems management features, etc. Dell engineers and technologists from the India and Austin R&D centres have submitted a variety of code patches upstream, and contributed to specification changes for ACPI and IPMI.

Jagadeesh R, senior manager, OS and Hypervisor Engineering

Jagadeesh R:It is just not the number of lines, but the complexity of the code that matters more. Some of our engineers actively look at code, and have suggestions for restructuring of code, removing deadlocks, and making existing code more efficient. The Dell India R&D Centre engineers are maintainers for three of the important Fedora packages.

Also, Dell has contributed to open source in various areas like IPMI, systems management and network subsystems. Our contributions are recognised by the community, and are part of major Linux distributions.

How can open source enthusiasts secure a job in the open source industry?

RB: Linux and open source offer a wide range of career options to professionals today. Since Linux is widely accepted in global corporate houses and start-ups, there is a tremendous demand for open source professionals across the industry.

What are the skillsets that the industry looks for in open source professionals?

RB: Currently, there is a huge demand for open source programmers in the area of cloud computing, virtualisation, multi-core application development, etc. Beyond that, since most hardware devices are supported on Linux, there will always be a great demand for device-driver developers and kernel programmers.

Divyanshu Verma, Linux engineering manager

Divyanshu Verma:Open source enthusiasts can secure their career in the industry by making code and other contributions to open source projects, such as Linux kernel development, Open Cloud, and open source virtualisation. This will help in making the industry confident of their technical skills and maturity to deliver industry-standard work.

How does Dell India R&D Centre reach out to the academia in India?

RB: We have a well-structured programme to build relationships with a few of the top institutes in the country. The programme allows one of the directors to sponsor the relationship, and nurture it through various activities including training the faculty, student internships at Dell premises, conducting workshops, guest lectures, etc.

There is a keen interest to sponsor research projects of common interest, depending on the faculty member’s area of research. Apart from this, Dell also recruits from selected top institutes, through its campus recruitment programme.

Recently, the Linux team from Dell India conducted a workshop for 70 faculty members from more than 15 colleges.

Vineet Tyagi, senior director, engineering, Impetus

Could you share more details related to the opportunities that exist at Impetus for Linux and open source experts?

We are looking to hire about 400 IT professionals, as per our growth plans. These appointments will be for our Noida, Noida SEZ, Indore and Bengaluru offices. We presently have quite a few projects in exciting technologies such as cloud computing, big data, mobile phones and social media.

Out of the 400 to be hired, a major chunk, about 20-30 per cent, will be freshers. We are planning campus recruitments very soon. The rest, of course, will be lateral hiring. Impetus is refraining from organising any walk-ins, as this practice does not work for the company.

Why is there such a thrust on adopting Linux and open source by IT companies?

Since Impetus works a lot on open source technology, most of the hiring will be of IT professionals with exposure to open source. Moreover, a shift from proprietary software is the trend of the times. Most of our clients look for open source technology because it tends to reduce the cost of the project. The licensing cost of proprietary software is eliminated. Hence, we are looking for almost 240 professionals with exposure to open source technology.

Most of the engineers at the Impetus Labs contribute in some fashion to FOSS. We would always welcome FOSS professionals to join us.

Is the demand for Linux and open source experts in the IT industry on the rise?

The use of FOSS technologies is on the rise. This will naturally result in an increased requirement of experts in this area.

What kind of skillsets should FOSS experts possess?

The key skills of FOSS experts should be (beyond technology proficiency) versatility and a good understanding of the ecosystem.

Do you feel Linux and FOSS can add value to the process of project/product development? Do mention a few advantages of using Linux/FOSS platforms or technology tools.

Yes, definitely. Linux and FOSS can add value to the process of project and product development in many ways. One of the biggest challenges that any project faces, relates to its completion on time. For helping product engineers and project heads in addressing this challenge, the FOSS ecosystem offers many pre-built packages/components/software, using which they can reduce the time of product development and ensure timely completion of projects.The key to successfully use this strategy lies in identifying appropriately licensed free and open source software for use in projects.

So, if we sum up, among the many advantages of using Linux/FOSS in project/product development, the key ones are: 1) reduction in total cost of ownership and product development, leading to cheaper cost of products; 2) higher quality of products; 3) and faster completion of projects.

Do you look for certified professionals when you make recruitments?

No, we don’t!

There is a misconception that there is no money to be made in building a business around FOSS. Could you tell our readers how open source enthusiasts can make money working in the open source space?

This is a myth! One can look at Red Hat and several other companies that have built large businesses around the FOSS ecosystem. In general, one can also adopt a dual-source model to establish a viable business around FOSS.

Baskar Selvaraj, founder, LinuXpert Systems

When was it that you were first introduced to the world of Linux and open source?

I got introduced to the world of Linux and open source in May 1998, when I first explored the Red Hat Linux 5.0 distribution provided along with an technology magazine.

How did this interest in FOSS turn into a passion and then a profession?

During my job as a system administrator in my earlier job, I used a proprietary operating system and platforms, and encountered a lot of problems. So I explored alternatives on the GNU/Linux platform to solve those issues, and that made me take the plunge with FOSS. From then on, there has been no looking back at proprietary platforms!

Eventually, FOSS became a passion for me, and I left the organisation, where I had acquired eight years of experience, to start LinuXpert Systems, a company that provides training and support services for academic institutions using only FOSS.

Tell us more about your early initiatives for the spread and adoption of FOSS in India.

In 2003, students who came to me for project training requested that I give some guest lectures at their institutions, for the benefit of other students, in order to help them choose projects based on the Linux platform and other open source tools. Very soon this information started reaching other institutions on the student grapevine. This helped us to reach many more colleges in the state, and spread awareness about FOSS — not only in colleges, but also in other sections of society.

When was it that you started this initiative to set up FOSS labs in Tamil Nadu colleges? What inspired you to take this up?

After delivering several guest lectures in colleges, I started getting requests to conduct workshops on FOSS.

Here, I explored the possibility of providing hands-on experience to the participants by establishing a FOSS lab, so that later, those who participated would continue exploring FOSS tools that they had been trained on. In the past one year, we have established FOSS labs in over 170 universities, engineering colleges and technical institutions in the state of Tamil Nadu (from August 8, 2010, to August 13, 2011), installing FOSS on more than 6500 computers, free of cost.

If we compare the Indian scenario with what’s happening abroad, students in many other countries make significant contributions to FOSS; but in India, I’ve noticed that many of our students have not even heard about this technology stack. As I strongly feel that most of the contributions to FOSS come from the academic community, I thought why not create opportunities — give our students the same level of opportunity to learn/work on FOSS tools/technologies, and eventually contribute to it.

“In India, open source software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people,” are the words once said by Dr A P J Abdul Kalam. This will only become true when our education system starts teaching students using a FOSS-based operating system and tools.

How was the initial response? Did you come across any challenges? And how did you surmount them?

The initial response from educational institutions was not as favourable as it is today. It was really challenging to convince faculty members in these institutions to go with FOSS. Besides, in 2003, the maturity level of FOSS didn’t match the requirements of these institutions.Things have changed a lot since then, in the FOSS world too, with regard to the maturity of solutions.

Sometimes, I had to make many attempts at a single institution to make the faculty and institution heads understand FOSS and its benefits. To convince them to adopt FOSS, I would share with them a lot of information, which I had collected from various sources, especially the AICTE recommended software list [PDF].

What has been the most motivating factor behind making you believe that this initiative would some day become a success story?

When I started receiving favourable responses to my academic initiatives, I began to believe that this initiative would soon catch on among young minds and also academic institutions.

Thereafter, I decided to spend most of my time interacting with students and the academic community, to take this FOSS movement to a national level — with the hope that this initiative would some day become a success story.

How do you motivate institutions or students to adopt FOSS?

The students are always curious to learn new things that they come across. So whenever I go to colleges, I usually take along various distros, live CDs and DVDs, and demonstrate the power of Linux OS/FOSS tools. I provide them with all the tools that I carry along, and request them to give these software a try.

In all my workshops, I usually request one of the student participants to install a Linux distro, so that the other students also get motivated by this.

As far as the institutions are concerned, I share with them case studies (many of which have been published in your magazine) of educational institutions, about the FOSS initiatives taken by other educational institutions in India, and explain to them the benefits that the latter are enjoying by adopting FOSS. I also apprise them about the growing job opportunities for professionals having skill-sets and expertise related to FOSS.

The welcome change that I observe nowadays is that almost all institutions have begun to evaluate FOSS alternatives for their academic requirements before going ahead with any recommended proprietary software.

What are the requirements for setting up a FOSS lab? What software and hardware are used? What is the approximate cost of the setup?

There are no specific requirements for setting up a FOSS lab. In case the hardware configuration is a recent one, we do remote installation on individual computers, where we install over 6400 packages from the Fedora repository using the Kickstart method and our FOSS lab server. In case of older hardware, we set up the lab using LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project). We install software equivalents for just about every proprietary application, i.e., office, multimedia, Internet, development tools, databases, programming languages, scientific and engineering software — almost everything that’s required to fulfil their academic needs.

As a policy of the company, the first FOSS lab setup is always done free of cost — and if the college or institution decides to implement FOSS throughout the campus or across departments, then we suggest they opt for our FOSS lab server, with support subscriptions.

What advantages does this kind of a setup offer to institutions and learners?

Such a setup offers several advantages:

• All the required software/documentation/tools (example: Wikipedia, distro archives, online manuals, remote installation/troubleshooting, etc.,) are available locally, for quick access, which helps conserve Internet bandwidth.
• They have a virus-free environment to work in.
• The FOSS lab server offers built-in networking functionality — DHCP, DNS, LDAP, Web server, QMail for Intranet mail, Samba server, DSpace with video streaming, and support for NP-TEL videos, to name a few.

Have there been instances when any of the students, faculty or institutions resisted working with a Linux, and wanted to go back to the proprietary software that they were familiar with?

I have seen very few such instances so far.

How did you deal with such situations or apprehensions?

This attitude often changed later, after we conducted workshops and training programmes for such students and faculty members.

Are you planning to take this movement to other states as well, once you have covered the colleges in Tamil Nadu?

Yes, definitely. We have plans to take this movement to other states with the help of local and/or national ILUGs. Also note that we have over 50 universities, 500 engineering colleges, over 300 polytechnics, over 650 arts and science colleges in our state. Going forward, we have a plan of setting up at least 500-plus FOSS labs in the next three years. I am hopeful that this initiative will become even more successful when more local and national LUGs join in and work together.

Are government agencies or state authorities supportive of such initiatives, in general? What has your experience been so far?

No. Our initiatives are not supported by any government agency or state authority. But, the inclusion of FOSS in the regular curriculum by Anna University of Technology has helped us to reach over 200 engineering colleges in less than a year.

From the young learners’ point of view, what advantages do you see in their getting exposed to FOSS at this age?

There are many. I would like to share the case study of a young learner, who is also a former student of mine. He started learning GNU/Linux and FOSS tools when he was in the first year of engineering, and went on to develop many tools, which are now a part of our FOSS lab server.

He made contributions to the Fedora project too, while he was in the second year of engineering. Now, he has his own startup that provides consultancy for many companies — including ours.

As far as I know, I have never seen him attending any job interviews, either those arranged by his college, or on his own.

This throws up a message to young learners — FOSS can not only get our youth well-paid jobs, but also help them transform themselves into entrepreneurs.

You are an active member of ILUG-C. How long has your association been with the group and what have you contributed to it?

My association with ILUG-C has been from 2005. My most significant contribution has been in making many of my students and faculty members from various institutions join the ILUG-C mailing list, and become active members of the FOSS community.

Our academic initiative would not have become successful without the help of ILUG-C. In fact, it is ILUG-C which has made significant contributions towards promoting FOSS in academics since 2000, through its members. Most notable contributions have been made by Raman P, Ravi Jaya, and Baskar K (all are independent FOSS trainers), who have helped us a lot in our academic initiatives.

Many argue that the FOSS philosophy is about allowing people freedom of choice so that they can choose what they want to use on their computers. But isn’t this movement in a way restricting their freedom of choice, and binding youth to work on software that may be “free” for their institution in some way, but is imposed upon them — i.e., they are not allowed the freedom to make a choice whether to use FOSS or not?

The movement is in no way to restrict their freedom of choice and bind the youth or institutions. It is the youth or institutions that decide on whether to go with “free [of cost] ” proprietary software provided by major corporations, which deny them “knowledge freedom”, or to go with FOSS, which allows them that.

Dr Giri Krishna, CEO, Silvan Innovation Labs

How has the demand for FOSS experts changed over the recent years?

Linux has been around for a long time, but people were waiting for it to be a mature solution. Large product companies would not consider open source, as they doubted its stability — but now, the research and development phase is over.

Over the years, FOSS has proved its stability in the industry, and many organisations are switching to using open source solutions rather than conventional proprietary solutions, because of the high costs associated with the latter. FOSS is very mature now, and it is possible to run Linux on a variety of platforms, making it a favourable commercial solution. This has led to a demand for FOSS professionals, especially in organisations that deal with technology and products.

With the Android explosion, Linux on hand-held or embedded devices is an upcoming area, and will see much more growth in the coming years, especially because over 50 per cent of smart-phones run on Android today. The main sectors driving this demand are industries like technology, semi-conductors, telecom companies and phone manufacturers.

Why aren’t there enough developers from India who participate in the FOSS community?

India needs many more developers with a Linux background. There is a shortage now, because most of them do not get FOSS training in their universities. In the US, UNIX and Linux is a part of the curriculum — but here, the focus is more on languages like C and C++, not on building knowledge on operating systems. Even during recruitment and placements, candidates are tested for expertise in language, and not operating systems.

Do you interact with the FOSS community regularly?

The Linux community is extremely helpful, and we often take its help. There is constant interaction at all stages, and when we get stuck somewhere, we depend on experts on the forums. For example, when we posted a query while facing problems with the kernel, we received responses in less than 24 hours.

However, our interaction has been limited to receiving advice, due to time constraints. Once we are equipped with enough employees, we will also be providing advice on the forums. It is a great way to demonstrate your expertise and establish your company’s presence in the industry.

What are the main problems you faced in adopting open source within your organisation?

Technical problems are comparatively easy to solve because if it gets tough, we can fall back on the FOSS community, for expert opinions from many renowned professionals. It is in terms of recruitment that we are still facing problems.

The main problem is the availability of FOSS experts. We find it difficult to find people who have Linux knowledge in the embedded space. There is enough information on the subject available online, but when we work on tight schedules, we want access to people who already know the subject and can quickly implement the system we are looking for.

How are you dealing with this issue?

As of now, we have been recruiting freshers, and we put them on the project directly. We provide them with on-the-job training, so that they are involved in the experience while they acquire practical knowledge. Being a startup, we do not have the resources or tools to provide training at present, but later, we are planning to provide training sessions for freshers.

What is the process of taking on FOSS experts?

We have a fairly detailed interview process, which starts with a test on programming skills, followed by one or more interviews that test the candidate for problem-solving and analytical skills. Most of our recruitment is done through head hunters and recruitment websites.

What skills do you look for while hiring employees?

We prefer people with good CE programming skills, knowledge of Linux (especially the internals of Linux), and a knowledge of digital signal processing (DSP), preferably in the video and imaging space. We are looking for people at various posts, and so, different levels of experience are also required.

How many FOSS professionals work at your office at present?

We have 20 software engineers, and all work on Android, Linux and Open CV. We are planning to hire many more people to arrive at a head count of at least 100 by the end of 2011. If we manage to find the talent, 75 per cent of the recruits would work on software. The development will be in Bangalore.

What advice would you like to give upcoming developers in India?

We need to encourage more enthusiastic developers to build a FOSS community in India. Since there will be a huge demand for FOSS experts in the coming years, I would like to see more students and freshers involved in the community, so that once they start working, they will be experienced enough to face problems easily.

What are the key open source tools that your company uses for product development?

We use an open source library for video analytics, called Open Source Computer Vision Library (Open CV). We have been using it as a base for developing our video analytics for security surveillance. Our surveillance cameras use Linux, and will run their own embedded video analytics.

Open source tools have been used in many stages of development on various products. These include Subversion (SVN) for revision and version management; VLC player for streaming H.264, MPEG4 and MJPEG streams; Boa Web server; FFMPEG libraries to record, convert and stream audio and video; the open source operating system Linux; Monta Vista for cross compiling; Cscope and Ctags for analysing the source code; Wis streamer as an open source streaming server; an open source NTP client, etc.

How can one benefit from using FOSS platforms or tools in project development?

Cost is a major factor. Using FOSS solutions ensures that your cost is reduced. Secondly, if you plan to use FOSS, you have access to expert advice through the FOSS community. If you are developing a solution or product on Linux, and face any problem, you can post the query to the FOSS community and people respond with suggestions, and sometimes even with code, to solve your problem. The community is eager to help — and that too, at no cost. However, in India there is limited expertise, and you will not find many active Indian members in the community.

How about a piece of advice to other firms that are considering the adoption of FOSS solutions?

Make sure you have at least a core team with enough expertise of open source software. It is now possible to gather experts, unlike how it was five years ago. Thoroughly verify if the FOSS option brings in real value to the functioning, or if it will bring in more problems. For example, we tried using OpenOffice.org, but we scrapped it, since MS Office is more popular in the ecosystem, and exchanging documents took more effort and time than expected. Also, check whether the community is active in the space you are considering. If it isn’t, you may have to wait a long time before the community responds to your queries.

Q: When and why did Datawind decide to enter the Mobile Internet NetBook market?
A: We launched our first mobile netbook in the UK in September 2009. After the success of our PocketSurfer devices, we wanted to extend our free-usage business model to other platforms, and felt that entry-level netbooks needed an improvement, especially with respect to costs. Thus, we decided to enter the Mobile Internet NetBook market.

Q: Elaborate on the USP of UbiSurfer over other netbooks. Could you elaborate on the hardware specs too?
A: The UbiSurfer uses cloud computing and our patented client/server architecture to deliver the power of a monster server in the palm of your hand. The richer and faster Web experience offered by UbiSurfer is a key USP over other entry-level netbooks. Our primary focus is on cost, and making the cost of both the hardware and the usage affordable for the masses. The use of a modified version of Debian operating system (OS) in the UbiSurfer Linux OS version has helped provide our users with a cost advantage. Bundling in a year of free mobile Internet access with the device provides a very compelling cost proposition. The device uses an ARM9 processor and has an 800 x 480-pixel, 17.8-cm (7-inch) screen.

Q: What is the estimated street price of UbiSurfer?
A: UbiSurfer with a year of free-mobile Internet is priced at only Rs 7,999. The device comes bundled with 30 hours per month of free Internet access for the first full year useable across India. In comparison, at an average price of Rs 500 per month, comparative rates for Internet access would cost Rs 6,000 per year, which is delivered for free on the UbiSurfer. For heavy users, unlimited Internet is available for only Rs 99 per month and each subsequent year of usage is only Rs 999.

Q: Which mobile service provider have you tied up with for the unlimited bandwidth? Is there any upper limit to bandwidth consumption or usage (hours)?

A: We have tied up with Tata Indicom for the service. There are no bandwidth limitations or upper limit, but the free usage and unlimited usage is restricted to our compression/acceleration servers.

Q: Whom should the user get in touch with to renew Internet connection after one year? Will a user face a vendor lock-in wherein he/she will be dependent on Datawind for bandwidth, which in other words means for operating the device, since the device is an Internet device?
A: Customers can pay the network operator directly, or put in their own SIM if they wish – but, in those cases, they’ll be dependent on the rates charged by the operator. In order to take advantage of our free usage and Rs 99 unlimited usage, the customer needs to utilise our compression service and and the SIM pre-embedded in the device.

Q: What gave you the confidence to offer an open source OS for the device? Did you conduct any survey before coming to this decision?
A: We didn’t conduct any systematic study but did conduct an internal survey among our retail partners in the UK, bulk of whom felt that there will be a substantial demand for a Linux OS mobile Internet netbook due to the cost advantage it provides. We were not concerned about perceptions about usability as we felt that open source was just beginning to climb the popularity peak in the developing markets, thus apprehensions were bound to exist. If we could provide the user with uninterrupted Web access at a cheap price, this Linux OS-based UbiSurfer was sure to be a winner.

Q: What advantages does the Linux OS bring to UbiSurfer users?
A: The key advantage of the Linux OS for our consumers is cost. It not only helps them save on the licensing fees but also on the margins added by the manufacturer and channels to bring the device to the customer. Further, the embedded Linux OS gives perfect performance, adaptability and robustness. It gives the user a stable work environment and secure software-running environment. However, more than the open source aspect, it was the cost effectiveness that drove us towards open source and would now drive our users too towards the Linux OS version of UbiSurfer.

Q: Is Datawind contributing to the Linux source code and writing/customising additional applications? If yes, elaborate. What are the applications in the pipeline?
A: Yes, we have contributed to the Linux code and built applications that can be downloaded from our website free of cost. Media player, paint, chess game etc. are some of the applications available for UbiSurfer. Looking ahead, we shall continue to focus on online Web-based applications for the device. Later this year, when we shift to Google Chrome, we hope to work in close association with the community to develop applications for UbiSurfer.

Q: How do you plan to handle the repair and maintenance of these devices? Do you have your own repair centres/ have tied up with someone? In how many cities, are their facilities available?
A: Initially, we will provide support through our customer support centre in Amritsar.  Customers would call our toll-free support line for diagnosing the problem. If it can’t be solved over the phone and requires physical repair or replacement, then the customer would be given a Return Material Authorization (RMA). With the RMA, they’ll be able to go to the original store from where they purchased it, for swap. Over time, we plan to tie-up with national repair centres too.

Q: What kind of tech support is being provided for the Linux versions of UbiSurfer?
A: If a user is facing any problem, then he/she can contact DataWind support at the toll-free number 1800-180-2-180. While basic consumer level, end-user support is being provided through this toll-free number, more technical or developmental support is being handled by our research and development engineers in Montreal, Canada.

Q: What is your product strategy to compete with netbooks powered by Linux/open source? How different is your product strategy for UbiSurfer in India compared to global markets?
A: Unfortunately, there are very few Linux-based netbooks left available in the market. We will continue to develop and enhance this platform. The focus on free Internet access will be our key differentiator from other available options in the market.

On a broader note, our strategy is surprisingly similar in other global markets, as in India. But if you go into specifics, we have introduced some modifications to reach out to potential customers. For instance, retail in India is largely unorganised and most customer shy away from purchasing on credit. This is why we have introduced direct sales agents to reach out to them.

Q: How does Datawind see the open source OS-based netbook market globally and in India? What are your growth projections for this market?
A: We believe the open source OS-based netbook market will be driven by large players, with the Google Chrome OS dominating the segment specifically. The entry-level devices in these segments will drive growth globally, crossing millions of units annually over the next few years. In India too, we see a huge demand especially in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities who are still dependant on Internet cafés and eagerly looking for a personal Internet connection that is affordable. The open source version of UbiSurfer provides them that.

Q: What has been Datawind’s marketing strategy, from the time of UbiSurfer’s launch in India to creating interest amidst the right target audience?
A: In order to create broad awareness, we aim to primarily focus on the consumer, with turnkey end-user solutions. To create consumer awareness, we are using TV infomercial and home shopping as the primary marketing strategy. To drive sales, we have collaborated with direct sales agents, independent retailers and e-commerce platforms. Mumbai-based Sunrise Distributors is our main distributor to reach out and create the large network of independent retailers and e-commerce partners. Along with this master plan, we are in talks to zero in on regional sub distributors to penetrate into the tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India.

Q: Are you looking at institutional customers too—like educational institutions or enterprises who want to buy in bulk? If yes, which are the key segments and what would be the value proposition for them?
A: Yes, we are also looking at institutional customers. These will primarily include those industries that have workers in the field. The key value proposition is the low-cost anytime/anywhere Internet connectivity.

Q: What is the feedback so far from the community? Has it led to any product enhancement so far?
A: It is early days, but the feedback has been strong, and you will see additional product enhancements from us this year

Aniruddha Vishal

IDC expects worldwide revenue for open source software to rise to $5.8 billion by 2011. Foreseeing the strong promise open source technology holds, Sonata has set up an Open Source Center of Excellence (CoE to evaluate and integrate various Open Source tools to deliver low cost solutions to its customers, with a faster time-to-market. Aniruddha Banerjee, head, technology services business, Sonata Software, talks to Vanisha Joseph of LFY about open source as a fertile terrain for the developer community.

Q: What opportunities exist for FOSS and Linux experts in the IT industry? What are the reasons for this sudden demand?

A: Open source is becoming the heart of enterprise computing, as it is the core of business applications in enterprises, allowing cost savings and improving processes. There is an increasing demand for free software tools as they are generally available at no cost and with functionalities similar to those available in commercial tools. With open source software and advancements in virtualised architectures, organisations gain the freedom to choose what applications and infrastructure software they want to evaluate (at no cost), which of these solutions they want to deploy and how they want to pay for that deployment — on-site licenses, hosted solutions, or software as a service (SaaS). Open source applications are now available for all common types of enterprise software-from databases, application servers and Web servers, to Web browsers and office applications, to network monitoring software and security software. The code base is stable, increasing the reliability of the software.

A Gartner report predicts the global market for open source software solutions to touch $6.4 billion this year. India is beginning to reap the benefits of open, community-driven technologies. The demand for free, open systems is growing and India possesses the innovation and expertise to deliver on this demand. An even stronger commitment to open source technologies from India’s government and leading businesses can help the country further capitalise on this opportunity.

It has been proven that open source software provides better value, lower costs and improved security, addressing enterprise considerations today. As enterprises adopt open source solutions, they seek employees with familiarity and competence in the same. Thus, there is a huge demand and growing opportunity for FOSS/Linux experts in the industry. The trained technical workforce meets only 1/3rd of all Linux jobs at present, thus, the future is bright for open source enthusiasts. A confluence of factors is driving such demand. While it’s easy to point to a tight economy as a key driver pushing organisations to open source, the increasing influence of an agile style of development and delivery, rise of cloud computing, maturity of open source tools themselves and the speed at which they keep up with new application technologies are crucial factors driving this demand.

Q: Do you feel using Linux and FOSS can add value to the process of project development? If so, please state a few advantages of using Linux/FOSS platforms or technology tools?

A: The most obvious benefit of free and open source platforms is cost. These platforms are easy to install, use, update and come without the heavy chains of licensing issues. The use of open source tools/platforms during a project development process can reduce the overall R&D costs, increase productivity, improve efficiency, facilitate interoperability and encourage innovation. Due to the availability of a wide array of FOSS business applications and tools today, enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) are benefiting in many ways. Open source offers unsurpassed security, lower cost of ownership, application flexibility, and innovation and scalability, which make it a perfect alternative for organisations looking for high performance and value. Further, enterprises get unlimited time to evaluate the features and functionalities before taking a final decision.

Q: As stated by you, cost is a significant reason for companies to adopt open source for projects. Elaborate.

A: The shift to open source applications and commodity infrastructure is as inevitable as the rising of the tide, as it makes good economic sense. Open source products are significantly less expensive than proprietary ones because a wide community of interested parties share the development costs. Open source software can also speed time to market and deliver substantially lower licensing and maintenance costs than other approaches. Further, it delivers comparable features and quality as well as greater deployment flexibility, enabling a more expansive use in enterprise applications.

More than 56 per cent of all enterprise users surveyed in a Forrester Report (“Open Source Paves the Way for the Next Generation of Enterprise IT”) said cost reduction was their primary motivation for using open source, and 87 per cent of them said their cost-saving expectations had been “met or exceeded.” Thus, the cost savings is crucial and even substantial.

Q: What are the key tools that your company is using for project development?

A: The open source tools we use are PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc.

Q: Elaborate briefly on your open source offerings.

A: For many years, Sonata has been a frontrunner in leveraging open source software as a platform for building software applications, helping its diverse customer base achieve productivity and cost benefits. Sonata currently has various full lifecycle projects that work exclusively on the open source tools stack. Sonata offers the following open source solutions and services: consulting services, designing / architecture and development of solutions on Java, LAMP stack, business intelligence and other open source tools, migration to and from open source tools to other tools, integration of open source tools with third-party product(s) and tools.

Q: Do you involve developers from the community or take any help from them during project development?

A: We have used development community forums to resolve issues we faced during project development. For instance, one of our projects involving opensource e-commerce applications needed to achieve single application instance to be accessed by different users through URL redirection. To achieve this we took help from the open source community and forums. In another instance, we needed to tweak an opensource logging tool component to handle multi-tenant scenario in SaaS application, and we once again approached the community for the same.

Q: What has been the contribution so far by developers at Sonata Software towards open source?

A: Developers at Sonata have contributed to the open source community to enhance certain products: for instance, http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=562672 is one such example where we have added custom reporting that is needed for open source requirement management tool and posted on this forum for others to use. Open Source CoE at Sonata Software enhanced the OSRMT as per GPL for generation of requirement traceability matrix.

Q: What challenges do you face today with regards to the adoption of open source technology? How do you intend to resolve them?

A: Some of the typical issues faced by our team are lack of updated documentation, lack of user manuals, no comments in code, different coding styles and so on. Sonata CoE has very senior architects and developers who have learnt to overcome these problems and move on by taking control of the tool. There are innumerable FOSS tools available in areas like content management system (CMS). In such a case, we use only the ones that are best and have essential features that are needed for any CMS tool.

Q: What kind of up gradation/training programmes do you offer your developers for sharpening their skill sets?

A: Sonata CoE team is constantly involved in identifying and exploring new open source tools that can be adopted for various projects or internal use. The team stays abreast of technological advancements, new tools and new versions. We organise training programs for our teams on specific tools based on the project needs. This also motivates them to come up with best practices and usage guidelines for those tools that do have such artifacts available.

Q: Do you have any team involved in R&D for any of your open source projects?

A: Sonata has set up an open source Center of Excellence (CoE). Sonata’s Open Source CoE has been constantly evaluating and integrating various Open Source tools to deliver low cost solutions to its customers, with a faster time-to-market. Sonata has successfully built a collaboratively integrated open source development and platform spanning the entire software lifecycle. This platform helps customers and teams accelerate their software development, release and software support processes, while improving their productivity and product quality. Sonata’s open source CoE has also built re-usable components that can be used in integration with third-party tools. This includes an open source BI framework as solution accelerator that prevents a solution from going through multiple iterations. We are currently exploring the possibility of working on an R&D project on open source storage management technology. Our teams are also working on product R&D for our customers; these projects are based solely on OS tools stacks.

Q: What skill sets do you look for in a FOSS expert?

A: The teams working on FOSS stacks need to be fast in understanding the overall architecture of the tool stack that they need to modify. In case the FOSS tool is a commercial application, then the professional should have domain expertise in that area to assess and adapt to the product functionality for a project requirement.

Q: How many Linux/FOSS developers are working at present in your company?

A: Currently, we have a team of 150 Linux/FOSS developers working with us on different projects. Sonata has some ISV customer projects that are purely being developed using open source tool stacks.

Q: Looking ahead, what kind of solutions are you seeking from the open source community?

A: The existing tools need to be more stable in the business application areas. We also require solutions in areas such as business intelligence (BI), reporting, Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture (SOA), infrastructure monitoring, Web monitoring, data security, e-mail security and cloud computing.

Q: What advice would you give other heads of operations of technology firms who are planning to try open source tools for software development?

A: Open source solutions are becoming more widely accepted and implemented at the enterprise level. There are many factors that need to be considered when one decides to explore open source solutions. It is essential to perform careful research and analysis of both the proprietary and open source software available to ensure that any solution selected meets current and future needs of the business and is a financially sound decision. The technology firms should also look for partners who will be able to help them evaluate and adopt the tools in the best possible way.

Q: What is your message to the community and the developer fraternity?

A: The open source movement has changed the course of modern software development. Certainly, Linux has been the most prominent example so far, but there is far more to come. Open source continues to infiltrate mainstream development at an even faster pace. The community should look at contributing towards the development of tools that are stable, with up-to-date documentation, for better adoption.