Open source software can save India $2 bn

As Indian consumers and enterprises evaluate the option of upgrading to Microsoft’s much-touted operating system (OS) Windows 7, to be officially launched on October 22, the free and open source software (FOSS) community has fired yet another salvo at proprietary software.

In the year 2010, if FOSS is adopted at 50 per cent levels across the economy, India can save around $2 billion (around Rs 9,800 crore), suggests a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. Even a very conservative estimate, notes the study, pegs the cost savings for use of FOSS on servers as an operating system or as an application at Rs 138 crore in 2010.

Moreover, anti-virus software sales in 2010 is likely to touch Rs 2,000 crore. This entire amount is a cost that can be avoided if FOSS products are adopted.

For instance, based on the projected sales of personal computers (desktops and notebooks), the study indicates that even if 50 per cent desktops are fitted with a FOSS operating system, the savings will be Rs 985 crore; if 70 per cent have FOSS, the savings will rise to around Rs 1,380 crore. The study, done with help from professors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, covered 20 organisations that have adopted FOSS.

Examples of cost savings with FOSS abound in the Indian context, asserts Prof Rahul De of the IIM-Bangalore who conducted the study. For instance, the Life Corporation of India, which — with an IT infrastructure of 3,500 servers and 30,000 desktops — saved about Rs 42 crore by adopting FOSS.

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Free Open Source Software: Bliss for Windows Users

Windows and Open Source seem to be mutually exclusive to each other. To most of the people, these are two different spectrums that can not overlap and intermingle.

If we talk of them simultaneously, we may invite conntroversies but this is not the scenario anymore. The landscape for free open source software that Windows users can really vouch on is increasing day by day.

The article will walk you through the various open source software that are available for free and really useful on Windows interface:

Filezilla: Filezilla is a full featured free Windows FTP solution that Windows users can use to upload their files. It is a full featured service that Windows users can use free of charges for a productive process. Filezila offers you the ability to handle the batch transfers and most operations are drag and drop affair. With this FTP Solution, you can sync files from a distant location.

The FTP Solution is the most powerful FTP clients available but its not so friendly interface is the bottleneck for the product.

Open Office: Get going with word processing tools anywhere and anytime with the open source office productivity suite. Open Office.org offers full office suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database tools. It gives tough competition to proprietary documenting tools from Microsoft and other SaaS offerings from Zoho and Google. The service is accessible from everywhere but unreliable import/export capabilities serve as the block. It is a powerful business productivity tool to save costs.

Firefox: It is the most sought web browser after Internet Explorer. This is one service that synonyms free open source. To people who are not so tech savvy, Internet Explorer is the best choice but to the generation who needs speed and faster access, Firefox is the best choice. The service is available for free downloads and is a good tool for use on Windows, if someone is looking for alternatives. Its customization abilities make it the most looked up browser.

TrueCrypt: The free encryption tool is at par with Microsoft BitLocker and in fact offers the same set of encryption utilities that users look for. It provides full disk encryption with key based recovery. On a broader note, it surpasses the security offerings of BitLocker with its support for many encryption protocols and more flexibility.

With its flexibility and compatibility with many protocols, the tool is a good free contender against Microsoft BitLocker.

7-Zip: The free open source compression software is at par with other paid compression tools like RAR and ACE. The package decompresses quickly and reliably. It offers everything that a user hunts in basic compression solution and is faster.

If you still confuse, Firefox and Linux for free open source, then you must try your hands on these free open source software for Windows; they are worthy enough for continual usage.

Source: http://www.itvoir.com/

The Best Free Open Source Software for Windows

InfoWorld - To many, free open source software and Microsoft Windows seem to be mutually exclusive. After all, the open source development model is most closely associated with the Linux OS and, to a lesser degree, various Unix derivatives. So when you mention the two together, you often get some rather strange looks. This is a shame because there exists a growing landscape of compelling free and open source solutions just waiting for the intrepid Windows user.

You probably already know one of them well. Firefox has long stood as a prime example of how the open source development process can work to deliver a first-class solution that rivals, and in many ways surpasses, the best that the commercial side has to offer. However, it would be a mistake to make that arduous (for novices) trek to Mozilla.com and stop there. Over the horizon are many more FOSS-on-Windows treasures waiting to be discovered, including tools that can improve your productivity, expand your lines of communication, and help keep you safe from threats along the way.

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Free software offers cheaper long distance calls

Panaji: Free software and open source solutions offer a huge potential to link your computer to the mobile phone and the inexpensive Skype networks - that allows you to make international calls over the Internet - and for sending out SMSes too.

This could help significantly narrow the digital divide "at the social level between rich and poor and geographical levels, between city and village," says Giovanni Maruzzelli, an Italian expert in the field currently touring India.

The Italian techie has held meetings at IIT-Madras, at Auroville, and at Mumbai, and now is scheduled to speak in Goa and Hyderabad.

Maruzzelli is the man behind the celliax.org project, that works with Internet telephony, computers, sound cards and mobile phones -- bringing all together in amazing ways.

Celliax uses second-hand, recycled and cheap cellphones as interfaces between VoIP and the GSM networks.

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Open source is about belief in code

You can read stories about doom and depression somewhere else today.

Instead I want you to look across the headlines to the other side of the chasm.

There is something there that does not exist in the proprietary wreckage, something important. Code.

Even if an open source enterprise should go belly-up its code should survive. That code can be enhanced, it can be forked, it can be turned into another business, perhaps with another business model, down the road.

The code will be there because those who forged both the FOSS and open source movements believed first in what they could do for code, and only second in what code could do for them.

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Nine Attitude Problems in Free and Open Source Software

I love free and open source software (FOSS). The cause -- essentially, an extension of free speech -- is one that I can get behind as a writer, and community members are not only brilliant but both passionate and practical at the same time. It's an exciting field, and the one in which I've chosen to make a career.

At times, though, the community can be its own worst enemy. Certain attitudes, often long-ingrained, make the community less united than it should be, and work against common goals, such as providing an alternative to proprietary software or spreading the FOSS gospel. Practically everyone in the community has been guilty of one or more of these attitudes at some time or other -- including me -- but we rarely talk about them. And, for this reason, the attitudes continue, hobbling community efforts.

Admitting these attitude problems seems the first step to overcoming them, so here are nine of the most common ones I've observed both in myself and in the community around me:

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Open Source Census Finds FOSS Everywhere

The Open Source Census, which I mentioned back in April, just dropped a press release this morning about the data it's been collecting. I chatted the day before with Kim Weins, senior VP of OpenLogic, a key co-sponsor of the census, and how they found a few ... surprises in the results.

Well, maybe they won't be total surprises to people who're intimately involved with the business and culture of open source, but I imagine they'll still raise a few eyebrows. For starters, there is quite a lot of open source software, of all stripes, being deployed on Windows machines.

This includes software deployed as an escape from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) (OpenOffice, etc.), packages used as support or infrastructure tools (zlib, OpenSSL, Perl, Samba), and things that have their own legacy as well -- like Firefox, which appeared on a whopping 84% of the systems surveyed. The vast majority of the top 20 or so packages also appeared on both Windows and Linux systems, so a good deal of what's being used is platform-agnostic.

Another revelation, which probably comes as a surprise only if you haven't been following open source news: Open source adoption in Europe far outpaces that of the United States. I chalked that up to two things: 1) a larger governmental role for open source adoption in Europe, and 2) less existing fidelity toward Microsoft by default there. "Governments and financial service companies" were the biggest leaders as far as use of open source packages, but a chunk who identified themselves as "Other" or "All Others" made up nearly half right there.

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Is Open source a synonym for Free software ?

The market for open source and free software is surging high with its appreciation in mainstream segment also. The free software products like Linux or others are moving from the walled boundaries of servers to desktops and laptops. Recently, launched Ultra low cost laptops were supported on Linux and that came as a major breakthrough for it to garner some spotlight from tech analysts.

But still the concept of free software and open source software is not clear with many of us. We are confused at the basic level and interchanging the terms for each other. We use the terms Free Source and Open Source interchangeably and get them confused with the concept that they are available for free.

To some extent the concept gels with what we consider “available for free” but not in complete sense. The word “free” is basically the misnomer. We confuse it with “free burgers” but it should be considered for “free speech”. No doubt that some softwares from both the communities are available for free of cost and are offered as free downloads but not all utilities.

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What do Free and Open Source Software Leaders Think of Microsoft?

No user of free and open source software (FOSS) can escape having an opinion about Microsoft. Microsoft products and technologies represent what FOSS users have left behind. Some consider it increasingly irrelevant, and others a shadowy figure comparable to Satan in the Middle Ages or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet, no matter how members of the FOSS community regard Microsoft, all of us have well-defined opinions on the subject that we can express eloquently at short notice.

But what attitude do FOSS leaders have about Microsoft? The question is not just gossip or a test of trustworthiness. How it is answered can indicate leaders' values and priorities, and whether they deserve to be followed at all. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) how large Microsoft looms in the free software world, the rest of us rarely glimpse the attitudes the movers and shakers have towards it.

To help provide a clearer view, I asked a number of prominent FOSS leaders how Microsoft affected their work and personal computing, how much of a threat Microsoft was to FOSS, and what the odds were of the company ever becoming a member in good standing of the FOSS community.

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