Kerala Launches ‘Swatantra’, World’s Largest
Integrated FOSS Facility in Govt Sector
Today, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan
launched ‘Swatantra’, which is billed as the world’s largest integrated Free
and Open Source IT facility in a government sector.
An initiative of the International Centre for
Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Swatantra would house the Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS) Incubation Centre & Training Space.
It is aimed at enhancing the governments
agenda of promoting democratic access of information with the objective of
sustainable economic development.
ICFOSS is an institution set up by the Kerala
government and having the combined mandate of popularizing FOSS for
universal use.
In 2001, Kerala becomes the first state
in India to formally adopt a pro-FOSS IT policy and later in 2009,
the state government started ICFOSS headquartered in Thiruvanthapuram.
FOSS is software
that have licenses that allow users to freely run the program for any purpose,
modify the program as they want, and also to freely distribute copies of either
the original version or their own modified version.
Besides this, Kerala also has Society For
Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), a registered society that has members from
academia, the IT industry, professional societies and Government of Kerala. The
vision of SPACE is to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
in academics, governance, corporate and individual use, and to support the use
FOSS for employment generation in Kerala.
For last 6-7 years in succession, an online
free software treasurehunt is being conducted by ICFOSS, as promotional event
for FOSS, called “Swatantra international conference”. SPACE has released
website code on Github as a free software under GPL 3 so that
people can host their own treasurehunt within an hours using this project.
Regards
Mr. Pralhad
Jadhav
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan & Co
Mobile @
9665911593
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