Open source solutions and projects that can dramatically change the day-to-day lives of the average citizen. These were recognized at the conclusion of the recently held Open Source India Week 2008. Twenty of the best projects from entries received through the last one year, were declared winners of the FOSS India Awards for 2008. Open Source India Week, India’s largest Linux and Open Source conference and expo, formerly held under the banner of LinuxAsia for four years at Delhi, showcased solutions for business, mobility and human welfare.

Based on an idea seeded by Nandkumar Pradhan, CEO, Red Hat India, the Awards were instituted in January 2007 by the Forum for Open Source Innovation in India (FOSII) and Linux for You magazine, with the goal of recognising Indians’ contributions to free and open source software, and to dispel the myth that India consumes more than it contributes to the free software world.

The primary criterion for evaluating the projects was the impact they would have on mankind, especially the role they would play in bridging the digital divide in India and their potential to change the way the average Indian computes. Community participation was another key criterion on which the 10-member jury evaluated the projects.

Close to 50 projects contended for the 20 awards, which were sponsored by the National Resource Centre for Open Source Software, a unit of CDAC. Said M.R. Rajagopalan, Director, NRCFOSS, “Through such incentives, NRCFOSS expects to stimulate young minds, encourage innovative contributions to the FOSS ecosystem and address the digital divide." Each of the 20 winners was awarded Rs 25,000.

The lead award was taken by “Hindawi”, a project submitted by developers Abhishek Chaudhary and Sweta Chaudhary. Hindawi enables system level programming in Indic languages, shattering the myth that full-fledged systems programming is not feasible in non-English languages.

Other top honours were taken by the “Zmanda Recovery Manager”, which simplifies the life of a database administrator with a simple-to-use yet robust recovery manager for the MySQL Server; and “Dhvani” – a framework to develop Indian Language text to speech systems – that works in Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam now.

A spin-off of the Simputer project headed by Dr Ramesh Hariharan of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Dhvani displays an obviously great potential. “The project’s primary focus is to enable accessibility features for physically-handicapped users. So, the users are Indians who want screen-readers in their own mother tongue.

Other awardees included KDE 2.5 Hindi, the games and localisation spins of Fedora, etc. It is interesting to note that some of the projects were initiated, executed or supported by leading IT companies such as Tata Consultancy Services and Satyam Computers. In a way, this indicates the role of free/open source software in the future of the IT industry.

Soniya Nautiyal