One day seminar on FLOSS for E-Governence being organised by Kerala State IT Mission, Government of Kerala and Centre for E-Governance Initiatives (C-EGI), in association with DARPG, Govt. of India. Red Hat India (Pvt) Ltd is lead industry partner for the program. Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is today a well-established genre of software, extensively used by some domains such as networking. FLOSS is also penetrating into most other application areas including educa- tion, e-governance, business and scientific applications. FLOSS represents a remarkable phenomenon in software, as it has achieved the present status with none of the conventional business structures would be expected with this growth. There are several reasons for the success of FLOSS, including technological, economic, legal and political. Technological robustness is what caused the initial interest in FLOSS, especially with scientific and research establishments and Universities where it first took root. FLOSS operating systems and appli- cations are much more powerful, stable and crash-resilient than most other systems. The legal-political reasons are also very significant, as FLOSS seeks to do away with restrictive and sometimes exploitative licensing regimes rooted in virtual monopolies that characterize much of proprietary software. For a country like India, the economic rationale of FLOSS is also very important, as it offers comparable--often superior--technological solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions. In order to review the role of FLOSS vis-a-vis E-governance, the KSITM and the Centre for E-Governance Initiatives (C-EGI), are jointly organizing a one- day seminar in association with the DARP, Govt. of India, New Delhi. The event is being supported by RedHat India. Participants include representa- tives from the Central and State Governments, industry, academia and civil society.
Society For Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment
Where free software is a way of life
