Free Software is a matter of liberty, not price.

Think of free as in "free speech", not as in "free cool drink".

Users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

For a software to be free, it requires the "Free Software License" like the GPL (General Public License).

Freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

• Freedom to run any program, for any purpose.
• Freedom to study the program and know how it works (Access to source code !!).
• Freedom to redistribute so as to help their neighbours.
• Freedom to improve the program and redistribute your improvements.
  

"Open Source" is an approach to design, development, and distribution.

Offers practical accessibility to a product's source.

The "Open source Movement" focuses on software development.

It was derived indirectly from the criteria for free software, offering accessibility and modification to a software's source code.

The open source model allows concurrent input from programmers all over.

This is contrary to the centralized models used by companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe etc.

FOSS stands for "Free And Open Source Software".

Softwares are liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change and improvise its design through accessibilty to its source code.

The "Free Software Movement" aims at spreading the knowledge of FOSS, promoting and developing free software to everyone.

We, the 'foss@amrita' team at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham believe in the 'Free And Open Source Software' initiative and the abililty to study, develop and redistribute open source software.

We aim at promoting the same within our campus, and henceforth spreading the knowledge of FOSS to students in and around our campus.

We make presentations, conduct hands-on sessions, and encourage the students to work on various FOSS projects.

Our members help the students and community to enhance their potential through the use of Free and Open Source Softwares.

Our Vision:

• Promote awareness about FOSS among the students, providing them with opportunities to explore the world of FOSS.

• Increase the use of free software, and promote the development of them by empowering programmers in the use of free and open source platforms, tools and technologies.

• Organize talks and sessions on FOSS, and annual conferences which is open to everyone.

• Research on open source projects and technologies, and develop it to support the students and redistribute it to the world.

• Increase the use of GNU/Linux, which is a free and very widely known free and open source platform.

Contribution of Amrita to the FOSS world :

Amrita VPN :

Amrita VPN (amvpn2) is a software framework for developing secure networking applications, such as Network VPNs or Secure Protocol Gateways.

Amrita VPN's remote API is based on the powerful and easy-to-use "Internet Communication Engine", allowing applications written in different programming languages such as C++, Java, or Ruby to invoke the API.

The project is currently under development. Latest code may be checked out from the sourceforge.net project SVN repository.

Amrita Research Labs
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, India

Web: http://arl.amrita.edu

The Sun's Code For Freedom Contest (2007):

Students of Amrita started contributing to opensource with the Code For Freedom 2007 contest organized by Sun Microsystems.

Amrita was conferred the ‘Champion University’ status contributing to 105 bug fixes and enhancements to Opensolaris, Apache Derby and Open Portal.

Ever since students have contributed to documentation projects enhancements and bug fixes.

http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/codeforfreedom/2007/winners.html

porting from rhpl.ethtool to python-ethtool, Feb 2010

Zubin Mitra contributed to Cobbler, by fixing a bug.
Details about Zubin's contributions ...

Extending Python keyring library to distutils, Feb 2010

Zubin Mitra, working under, Tarek Ziade made contributions towards extending the use of Python keyring library to distutils Details about Zubin's contributions ...

Transifex Patches, Feb 2010

Zubin Mitra, an IT student, contributed patches to Transifex, including update entire codebase to PEP-8 and modify database to accept user login name only; not entire URL
Details about Zubin's contributions ...

KDE Malayalam Contributions - SMC, Feb 2010

Seshagiri Prabhu, 2nd year Computer Science student, contributed to the localization efforts of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing to include Malayalam in the latest release of KDE 4.4.
The following are from the mail he recieved from Manilal
"kudos to Praveen, Syam & Seshagiri to take Malayalam again to kde-4.4 "
Details about SMC project...

Haiku - BeZilla patches, Feb 2010

Rahul Krishnan, 2nd year Computer Science student contributed to Haiku - BeZilla project patches (user land bugs / patches) including the ones related to : User Interface corrections and standardizing the browser menus.
Details about Rahul's contribution to BeZilla ...

Sahana-Py, Feb 2010

Sahana is basically a disaster management system. Sahana-Py is a RAD based implementation of the same to help coordinate and organize the disaster management at Haiti. Zubin Mitra, an IT student, made a geolocator module which takes a location and returns its position(long. and lat.). Output is taken to OpenLayers and position is displayed on the map.
Details here...

Student selected for JavaOne 2009 at San Francisco

Avinash Joshi, a final-year B Tech student of Information Technology at the Amritapuri Campus, was chosen as the only student from India to attend the JavaOne 2009 Developer Conference in San Francisco, completely sponsored by Sun Microsystems.

Avinash (second from left), at JavaOne 2009.

See his blog entry on this.

School OS for NCERT

School OS is specially designed for school children by Shyam and Avinash (final year IT student), while interning with SUN, in collaboration with NCERT and IIT Delhi. The School OS is determined to spearhead the rise of open-source in the primary & secondary education system of India. The project was based at Sun Microsystems, Delhi office. They also went to the schools to install and test the operating system.

Contribution to Android - ADC2, 2009

Three students from 2nd year Computer Science, Rahul, Shilpa and Seshagiri, participated in the Android Developer Challenge 2(ADC2). They had made a game of "Tic Tac Toe" that runs on the Android platform. This is now an OpenSource project hosted at google code.
See the blog entry here.

Application porting to Open Solaris

Varun Rao and Adithya, 3rd year Computer Science Engg. students, made contributions to Open Solaris by porting applications. They worked on porting applications like "Parcellite", which is a clip board manager for Open Solaris.
See his blog entry on this.

First Non Sun employee to contribute to Open HA Cluster

Abhilash, a finaly year student of Computer Science Engg., contributed to a bug fix on Open HA Cluster by someone not employed by Sun!

GlassFish Examples and documentation

Archana N, Computer Science Engg. (2009), made contributions to the Java EE/GlassFish documentation on how to secure the existing EJB converter example from the Java EE tutorial using mutual authentication. It is included along with the original documentation.

Project Directory Listing URL: Implement certificate security in Glassfish
Project Space URL: http://implementsecurity.dev.java.net

The Sun's Code For Freedom Contest (2007)

Students of Amrita started contributing to opensource with the Code For Freedom 2007 contest organized by Sun Microsystems.

Amrita was conferred the ‘Champion University’ status contributing to 105 bug fixes and enhancements to Opensolaris, Apache Derby and Open Portal.

Ever since students have contributed to documentation projects enhancements and bug fixes.

IBM TGMC 2007

Our students won the IBM Great minds challenge (TGMC '07)using open source tools like eclipse and java. Abhilash, Sandeep, Deepthi and Vidya were part of the team that came 5th in TGMC '07.