Open Source Days 2008 (Aug 2 - Aug 10)

Open Source Days 2008 is a 9-day event scheduled to be held from Saturday, August 02, 2008 to Sunday, August 10, 2008.

The theme is - 'Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

The Objective of Open Source Days 2008 is to educate and empower participants with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed in todays fast changing IT world.

You need solid technical skills to do well in your academic career, in your job to deliver results. Open Source software helps you acquire those skills and build your credentials.

Open Source Days 2008 is a fun-filled yet technically focussed event which has a mix of technical presentations, interactive discussions with professionals and workshops. There will be many hands-on Workshops at multiple locations.

There is also going to be a Quiz on 9th of August from 4:30pm - 5:30pm.

Writing code, executing test cases, reviewing bugs, participating in Open Source community projects helps develop software programming and communication skills. As part of the Twincling mentorship programme, you get to learn about the various Open Source project opportunities and how you can participate. You'll also have a chance to discuss and know about mentors.

Thanks to sponsors, You can win yourself Software CDs, T-shirts and other exciting prizes like Headphones, DVD Player !

Workshop Focus Areas (Technical areas)

. Linux/UNIX Administration

. Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Setup and Administration

. OpenSuSe 11 Linux Setup and Administration

. FreeBSD 7 administration

. OpenSolaris 10 administration

. Package management (portage, ports, pkg, rpm)

. Ruby scripting

. Portable shell scripting

. Regular Expressions

. Linux systems programming

. Linux network programming

. Building Linux Clusters

. OpenSolaris Systems Programming

. Linux File system (ext2) concepts and programming

. File system development

. Linux TCP/IP stack internals

. BSD TCP/IP stack internals

. Network Security (SSL, IPSEC)

. OpenSSL and PKI infrastructure essentials

. Developing Anti-Virus software

. Anti-spam software development and Bloom Filters

. PostGreSQL database setup and administration

. PostGreSQL C++ / Ruby / PHP database programming

. LAMP setup, configuration and PHP 5 programming

. WebServices and SOAP programming with PHP

. Drupal module programming (for Drupal 6.2)

. ISO C99 Programming and library development

. OpenSSL API Programming using C

. Firefox architecture and developing Firefox plugins

. Firefox XPCOM C++ programming

. C++ Programming (class based design, functors)

. C++ and STL (Standard Template Library) Programming

. C++ GUI Programming with QT 4.3

. KDE 4.x plugins programming

. Open Source Games design and programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. OpenGL Programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. Semantic Web Essentials, RDF, Ontology, DAML

. XML essentials and programming (DTD, XMLSchemas, XSLT)

. XML Security vocabularies (XMLDSig, XMLEnc, XMLKMS)

. Core Java Programming

. Enterprise Java Programming (Servlets)

. Middle-tier Java Programming (EJB)

. Software Design Patterns

. Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

. Middleware technologies - CORBA - C++ programming

. AI Agent programming using Prolog

. Developing Distributed Applications with Erlang and OTP

. Real-time Streaming Multimedia using Helix Community server

Workshop Focus Areas (Community)

. Getting started in Open Source Projects

. How to contribute to OpenSuSe Linux project

. How to contribute to Gentoo Linux Project

. KDE 4.x project and opportunities

. Twincling projects

. Open Source Games projects


All Workshop sessions have been modularized for 1-day, 2-day or 3-day sessions with focus on programming and follow up projects. To the maximum extent possible, the Society will be providing course material for the various workshop sessions online and in PDF format.

How to register your college ?
Write a mail to info@twincling.org with your college name, contact number and the topic (please select upto two topics) you are interested in having a workshop on. The Organizing team will get in touch and finalize the event.

Please note that the best three participants from each college will get T-shirts and also an offer of mentorship in the Twincling Open Source projects.

So, Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

Organizing Team

Namita Iyer
Twincling Society.

Leela Manoranjan
Cordys.

Maruthi Vutla
AppLabs.

Rajesh Sarangapani
Accenture.

Sumit Upadhyay
Bank of America.

Sampath Inturi
Open Source Geek.

Ananth Pattabiraman
Open Source Geek, Music composer.

Umamaheshwararao Lankoti
Azingo.

Saurabh Bhatia
Safew Labs.

Ragu Pattabiraman
Intergraph.

Saifi Khan
Twincling.

About Us
Twincling Society is India's "first" independent, professionally managed, not for profit, registered Open Source promotion and development organization. Incorporated in Hyderabad AP, India, the charter of the Society is - to promote and develop Open Source software.

Twincling Technology Foundation is an initiative of Twincling Society with a single track focus on technical excellence and innovation. All the software developed by Twincling Society is released under Apache Software License 2.0 (ASL).

Website
http://www.twincling.org/

Helpline
+91-98484 59669
+91-98492 53753

Contact Us
info@twincling.org

Sponsors
Twincling Society would like to thank Avansec for sponsorship of the event. Avansec is a startup, focussed on developing green solutions for datacenters.

Would you like to be sponsor for the event ?
We'd love to hear from you. Please write to info@twincling.org

OSEF 2008 - bringing entrepreneurs together

It was an exhilirating experience working towards OSEF 2008 and Community 2008, and accomplishing the goals of promoting the Open Source vision.

Maruthi, Namita, Alolita, Nilayan, Uma and Saurabh had done an amazing amount of groundwork thinking through, involving the right set of people and executing it.

Poorna Shashank, Sumanth Krishna, O V L Kiran Kumar, Ramesh Rajamani and E. Sivakrishna of Synovel, were supportive of the event and volunteered for assistance. A big thanks to all. You guys rock !

The event started with Ms. Namita Iyer, President of the Society, talking about Open Source and how it helps boot strap product companies that can go on to build market leading products and nurture a community as well.

Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and CEO, Technetra, started the session by asking the attendees a simple question - "what are three words that come to our mind, when we think of Open Source". The question really set a buzz among the members and make the people really interactive.

For the first time it has been possible in the IT industry that corporates can access "fairly" and "openly" world class software developed by world class developers.

Sharing between competitors provides them a level playing ground to compete in developing innovative applications over Open Source platform.

According to Alolita, "The competition is in innovation and providing services. It is a key enabler of change for prosperity".

The talk by Mr. D D Ganguly, founder and CEO of DimDim was awesome and as candid as ever.

He shared his startup experience and how he acquired seed capital and further funding from VCs. He talked about how to play the mating game with VCs in order for them to find your venture attractive enough to fund. VCs fund in millions, hence will never do seed funding. For seed funding, entrepreneurs should find someone who loves them and will fund them for being them. Last but not the least, he emphasized that the primary motive of entrepreneurs should be to create wealth for themselves and for their stake holders. The audience thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with a successful open source entrepreneur - who actually got big VCs to fund his venture.

Mr. D D Ganguly from DimDim, Mr. Suren Poruri from Polaris, Mr. Pramod and Mr. Sivakumar from AppLabs, folks from CA, Mr. Sivakrishna from Synovel, budding entrepreneurs from Genpact, NIC, Satyam and many startup companies actively participated in the session. Mr. Saurabh Bhatia, of SafewLabs shared his journey as an entrepreneur with the audience.

Mr. Sivakrishna, CEO of Synovel, presented an overview of Spicebird at the event. In his words, Collaboration is much beyond e-mail communication – it's a process where individuals work together to achieve a common goal. Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make 'working together' possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.

Ms. Kavita Vemuri of Innovation Lab, and Dr. Vikram Pudi of Open Source research at IIIT Hyderabad, were very supportive of the event from the word go. Kavita also teaches Product Management at IIIT to the students and is also involved with academia to industry transfer initiatives.

In the future, we look forward to interacting very closely with students and faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad on Open Source activities and also conduct course on Open Source software licensing and legal issues. At Twincling Society, we invested a lot of time in working through Open Source licensing, Copyright and Trademark issues. This is critical as we are focussed on infrastructure software products development and want to create the largest ecosystem in the world ! more on that later.

To keep the participants energised and vigorously participate in the discussions, lip smacking Samosas, Paneer Pakoda and delectable Kala Jam from Tiwari Sweets (one of Hyderabad's best sweet shops) was laid out for all the attendees to savor.

We wanted to make sure that the best people, the best speakers, the best food and the best arrangments are made for such a special and first of its kind event ! At all Twincling events, the focus is on the quality of interaction, discussion and genuine interest.

The best part is that Hyderabad has that kind of people with energy to engage in discussions.

If that sounds incredible, then you should remember that OSEF 2008 came to an end at 4:15pm and Community 2008 started at Applabs GEC at 5pm. The GEC is located atleast 10 km from IIIT and a lot of the attendees of OSEF turned up for this event as well.

Sreeram Kaviliga, AVP and Arun D. Rao, VP, my close friends at AppLabs, were the hosts for Community 2008 at 3XL Conference, AppLabs GEC. Arun, spoke on the occassion, sharing his vision about Open Source and how he sees close synergy between AppLabs goals and Twincling Society.

Sai Chintala, VP, and Rajesh Patil, Architect, made a presentation on Open Source initiatives at AppLabs, TEMA product and also shared their experiences.

Alolita who is a Director on the Board of Open Source Initiative, spoke on "How to build an Open Source Community".

The importance of nurturing an Open Source community with the right elements and Community leads cannot be over emphasised.

At Twincling, we have cultivated a "user" community with an excellent mix of professionals and students in the last 4 years. The experience that we have gained is immensely valuable and positions us uniquely.

Now, as we move to the GLOBAL orbit of developing world-class Open Source products (licensed under Apache License 2.0), we need to mentor and cultivate a "developer" community.

A "developer" community will create a better quality IT workforce in Hyderabad and provide Andhra Pradesh a competitive advantage.

How are we going to do that ? Well, i'll talk about that in the next blog.

Coming back after the event, we had a long day and all of us were physically tired and yet we had a 5-hour long Strategy meeting to chalk out the go-GLOBAL plan.

Special thanks to our dear friends Pratima and Ajay at Cybermedia who helped with the subscription form and May 2008 issues of the DARE magazine. It is an amazing magazine, 'DARE - Because entrepreneurs do'. Guys, we still have a few magazines available to give out to folks. So, if you are interested, please drop in a line to info@twincling.org and collect it at the next Saturday meet.

Thats not all :-) To further discussions on entrepreneurship, we have WiTi (What I Think Is) list. Consider joining it at, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witi

See you all at, TWINCLING Open Source Summit 2008 on Saturday, December 13, 2008.

What makes TWINCLING Society unique ..

TWINCLING Society is a "not-for-profit" society, incorporated in Hyderabad, India, under the Andhra Pradesh Societies Registration Act, 2001. (10th December, 2001, vide G.O.Ms.No. 742, Revenue (R&M), dt. 10.12.2001).

The charter of TWINCLING Society is to Promote and Develop Open Source software.

The Society conducts Technical Events on Open Source technologies on 2nd Saturday of every month. Technical Workshops are conducted to demonstrate live scenarios to organizations and community. As part of the student outreach programme, the Society volunteers have conducted numerous technical sessions at more than fifty colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Western Maharashtra.

Open Source RoundUp is an annual Open Source event conducted by TWINCLING Society that brings together the Open Source community, to discuss trends, core issues, opportunities and challenges in the Open Source arena. This event is conducted in Hyderabad in the second week of December every year.

Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum (OSEF) is an initiative of the Society to assist entrepreneurs in building their Open Source businesses and create a platform that brings together experienced professionals, angel investors together and facilitates exchange of ideas and networking opportunities.

The Society is led by a strong professional and technically experienced Team that takes pride in execution. The Society activities are managed by a seven member Board and governed by the Society bye-laws. Ms. Namita Iyer is the President, Mr. Satish Vellanki is the Vice President,Mr. Sumit Upadhyay is the General Secretary and Mr. Narender Rao is the Joint Secretary of the Society. The board executes ideas and strategies jointly evolved with the senior and experienced professionals of the Advisory Board and the Community Leads, who map them to community activities.

The Society operates a bank account at ICICI Bank, Nagarjuna Hills branch. The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Society is held in December every year. The AGM consolidates the suggestions from peer international societies, legal counsel and auditors, to define the strategy and plan of action, for the next year.

The Society has more than 2,600 members with a significant reach out initiative in Andhra Pradesh. The society has assisted organizations and educational institutions in migrating to Open Source technologies. Society volunteers have received numerous appreciation shields and letters from the beneficiaries.

To support a vibrant Open Source community, the society activities are organized around Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that focus on

• Open Source technologies
• Storage Technologies
• Entrepreneurship
• Ethical Hacking

IRC Channel
#twincling on freenode.net

Contact Us
To know more about our Open Source vision and participate in community activities, please write to info@twincling.org or call the society helpline at +91-98492 53753

Highlights, Photo gallery and future

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for making the Open Source RoundUp 2007 a wonderful and memorable success.

Key highlights:
. A large number of professionals who interacted with the would be professionals
. An insightful product idea presented by Mr. Ananth, a musician as he discussed the requirements of his profession.
. An excellent community discussion by Mr. Sumanth Krishna on Ruby on Rails and Mr. Abhishek Sinha on Java/Spring framework.
. A pragmatic and straight talk by Mr. Yaser Ansari on Project management in Open Source
. A heart to heart discussion on key issues by Mr. Maruthi Sivakumar Vutla which discussing 'CEO/CTO perspective on Open Source'
. The party was real fun with two cakes being cut and lots of tasty snacks from Gokul chat.
. 180 T-shirts being distributed among the delegates.
. The total event expenditure was about INR 21,380.

The Society would like to thank all the speakers - Mr. Mahesh, Mr. Manish, Mr. Rajesh, Mr. Naveen, Ms. Namita, Mr. Srinivas, Mr. Yaser, Mr. Maruthi, Mr. Srinivas Kavuri and Mr. Sumanth, for taking out their valuable time to interact with the community and share their experience.

The Society also thanks the esteemed delegates for such enthusiastic participation and interaction.

The photo gallery has been updated with the photos and the photos have been classified under various sections to provide a logical feel for the entire event. Please visit http://www.twincling.org/node/193

Open Source RoundUp 2008 is scheduled to be held on Saturday, December 13. It will be a full day event at an auditorium. The key focus areas for the year 2008 event are available at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/408410

With the support of the community, we hope to be able to make this year's event a greater success.

Thanks for your patience and understanding !


regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Ps. we are sorry for the delay in updating the photographs.

twincling conducts Linux seminar at BRECW

The twincling team conducted Linux seminar at BRECW.

Bhoj Reddy Engineering College for Women is a reputed college offering courses courses in various streams of engineering and IT. The college has about 2000 students on its rolls and provides good lab facilities.

The entire twincling team was received by the Head of Dept, CSE and introduced to Prof. S. R. Ramaswamy, principal of the college. Prof. Ramaswamy talked about his vision for the college, industry focussed course content and soft skills.

The seminar was held in the main Seminar Room and was attended by about 140 students.

The keynote talk titled 'The Art of the OpenSource' was delivered by Ms. Namita Iyer. She introduced the concept of opensource software and highlighted the evolution and contribution of leaders like Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Brian Behlendorf among others.

She talked about the 'Bazaar model' of development for Linux kernel. He highlighted the "category killer" products like Linux kernel, MySQL database, Apache httpd and BIND.

She mentioned some of the reasons for the success of opensource software:
. availability
. timescale
. product features
. talented software developers
. peer review
. adoption by researchers in diverse fields

She also brought to notice, the factors that can cause the failure of projects:
. technical (lack of code modularity, portability)
. management (lack of standards, no risk assessment, no measurable goals, bad coordination)
. resource availability (nobody to do mundane tasks like doc, testing, field support, i18n, l10n)
. too many demands and too few developers
. discontinuation of the project

Some of the above mentioned points presented a balance view of the situation at hand.

There was visible interest among the students and they raised interesting queries about opensource software security, development and vulnerability fixes. This was a very pleasing discussion since the students are aware of some of the core issues.

Sasidhar Kalagara delivered a talk on 'LAMP platform' and 'PHP5'. He highlighted the importance of service oriented architectures for todays marketplace. The key components of the L:Linux A:pache M:ySQL P:HP platform were highlighted and technical details were provided.

Sasi, involved the audience by pointing out feature comparisons between ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and LAMP/PHP technologies. He discussed PHP arrays construct in detail. He built up the interest of the audience to introduce them to PHP5 which has the following interesting features:
. excellent support for OOP
. completely rewritten MySQL extension
. interoperable XML tools (SimpleXML)
. Embedded database with SQLite
. Exception handling
. Iterators
. First class SOAP implementation

Some of the student sought clarifications on PHP vs ASP and MySQL vs Oracle in terms of technology, features and job opportunities.

A vote of thanks was tendered towards the close of seminar. After the seminar the speakers interacted with the students and addressed their queries. Overall it was a well attended and interactive seminar.

The twincling executive committee puts on record and tenders thanks to Mr. G. Ravinder Reddy and H.O.D. CSE Dept for working together to organize the event and the required infrastructure.

twincling team excels at the Linux Workshop

The twincling team conducted the Linux Workshop at Osmania University on Saturday, Feb 19, 2005.

It was a well attended event with about 85 participants from various colleges of Hyderabad.

The event planning committee of twincling had earlier taken the decision of presenting the Open Source value proposition as a theme for this event.

The talk on multibooting/GRUB was given by Namita Iyer and Ganesh B, both twincling members. The speakers presented the concept of booting, how the hard disk is understood (CHS, LBA modes) and the Master Boot Record (MBR). A detailed discussion was undertaken along with a lot of diagrams to ensure that the participants have first hand knowledge.

GRUB (Grand Unified Boot loader) was discussed next in detail. Namita discussed the various features of GRUB which included talking about network booting, remote booting. Ganesh extended the discussion further by talking about the various stages in GRUB namely stage 1, stage 1.5 and stage 2.

After the talk, the workshop was conducted where the participants did hands on using 'qemu' emulator booting FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. The participants were visibly excited while trying out the program.

The entire twincling team of Sashidhar Kalagara, Martin Samuel, Namita Iyer and Saifi Khan worked with the participants and assisted them to get the GRUB commands right and boot up FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. Ganesh the workshop lead was in his best 'tinker' elements and enthralled the audience.

Many of the participants tried out the various applications shipped with DSL (Damn Small Linux). In fact, some of the participants were comfortably playing games!

Based on the suggestion by OU/CSE Org Committee, Saifi undertook a short interactive discussion with the participants on 'Linux and OpenSource myths'. He talked about the practical concept behind Free Software and how it creates an ecosystem for multiple parties to develop software. He also talked about Open Source code security that is talked about a lot in popular press and the various opportunities. The concept of 'collaborative software' development was highlighted.

The participants asked many questions and also live polls were conducted on popular ideas about Free/Open software.

The final talk of the day was on the LAMP platform, A Linux web solution. This talk was given by Saifi Khan, a twincling team member.

Saifi highlighted the 'Services opportunity' over the development platform and the kernel. The Open Source software developers are interested in developing infrastructure services that are built on free and open standards. This helps in designing sophisticated service architectures that are both interoperable and integrable.

A keypoint of the talk was that 'Service Oriented Architectures have a pattern'. This powerful idea was demonstrated using the web (apache) server and the persistence (MySQL) server architectures.

The next important idea was that 'Server-Side scriptability' is a key enabler for better integration and rapid application development. The audience was introduced to the capabilities of PHP, Apache, MySQL and Linux.

LAMP based website management, content management, forum software were mentioned by way of illustration. It was also highlighted that L is (Linux, *BSD), A is(Apache), M is (MySQL, msql, PostgreSQL) and P is (PERL, Python or PHP).
So, the developers have a lot of choice and opportunities for developiing service oriented solutions.

Finally, the vote of thanks was tendered.

A lot of participants came up and raised queries with the twincling speakers. Many were seen exchanging contact information. The participants took home with them knoppix 3.7 distro, of which more than 75 copies were stamped by the twincling team members.

The twincling team is very pleased with the successful execution of the Linux Workshop.