Open Source is getting bigger by the day in India. Success stories such as Tamil Nadu going completely open source, NRCFOSS and CDAC launching Debian based BOSS Linux distribution tailored for India in many Indian languages and the recent steps by Gujarat State Education Board(GSEB) to give 50% weightage to Open Source and Linux in Computer subject across all streams (Science, Commerce and Arts).
There is lot more happening to get the best of FOSS to students. Project FOSSEducation initiative by Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay(IIT-B) is an Ministry of Human Resource Development(MHRD) funded project as part of the National Mission on Education through ICT with the thrust area being Adaptation and deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB, ORCAD etc.
*The goal of the project is to replace the use of commercial tools in Indian science and engineering education at the college level*
The project is hiring developers, paying them top salaries to work on FOSS softwares such as Scilab, NumPy, SciPy, etc. I wish Professor Prabhu Ramachandran and his team all the success in their endeavor and wish for lot more such news from all over the world 🙂
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
This is Good to hear! Pity thing is that GSEB is going to use RHEL 4 and not RHEL 5 in their curriculum.
No, they have not specified which Linux distribution to use, they have mentioned Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian all as most popular choice available. Just the login screen they used it RHEL, rest is just gnome, openoffice, netbeans screenshots, that can be on any distribution.
GSEB cannot be vendor specific, that would defeat one of the points they mention “No discrimination”.
That is most welcome step if they can try different linux distribution which will show the richness the GNU/Linux has over other OS.
Awesome news… I wish karnataka 2 go completely FOSS soon..So is the rest of the nation..
Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS.
forclosed homes