Free software helps Indian techies in many projects

Wed, May 21 04:17 PM

Bangalore, May 21 (IANS) Free software and open source tools are
helping a range of Indian entrepreneurs to build software solutions
that enhance the potential of computing for millions.

With names like Hindawi, Zmanda and Dhvani or KDE Hindi, these
products are helping an entire new generation of software developres.

Hindawi (hindawi.in) is a suite of open source programming languages.
It allows people to write computer programmes in languages other than
English.

The Zmanda Recovery Manager (zmanda.com) is a perl-based utility used
to automate backup and recovery of MySQL databases. Prominent on its
management team are Indian names like Chander Kant, Paddy Sreenivasa,
Ram 'TK' Krishnamurthy, and K.K. George.

Dhvani (dhvani.sourceforge.net) is a text-to-speech Indian-language
initiative. It allows a Simputer to read what the user types. It was
built to ensure that literacy and English skills were not essential to
use the Simputer.

Using images in conjunction with voice output in local languages makes
a computing device accessible to a larger section of the Indian
population. Other winners are Fedora Spins, and KDE Hindi of
indlinux.org.

MayaVi (mayavi.sourceforge.net) is an open source tool that allows
easy and interactive three-dimensional visualisation of data.

In 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran, then a IIT Madras aerospace engineering
student, started work on the MayaVi project with his colleagues to
visualise computational fluid dynamics data.

'Popular tools available for the purpose at that time were proprietary
and prohibitively expensive,' noted the Linux For You magazine,
published from Delhi, which has announced its FOSS (Free and Open
Source Software) India Awards for those involved in a 'saga of
innovation'.

Peter Thomas of Satyam here worked on JTrac (jtrac.info), a FOSS
'issue-tracking web application'. That is a computer software package
which manages and maintains lists of issues, as needed by an
organisation. It is used to create, update and resolve reported
customer issues.

Abhas Abhinav's DeepRoot Linux team here has developed deepOfix
(deeproot.in/deepofix), which 'gives many proprietary mail servers a
run for their money', commented Linux For You.

Another of the Indian winners was TuxType - into which five students
of the Government Engineering College at Thrissur built Unicode
Malayalam support.

This made TuxType (tuxtype.sourceforge.net) the first FOSS typing
tutor to bundle Unicode support for Indian languages, at a time when
Indian language solutions in computing is eagerly awaited, so that the
potential across the country can be better tapped.

WANem (wanem.sourceforge.net) is a wide area network (WAN) emulator,
coming from the Tata Consultancy Services. It was built to provide
team-members WAN access. Other WAN emulators were hardware-based,
expensive and available to only a select few in test labs.


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Frederick FN Noronha * Independent Journalist
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