Software Freedom Day ’09 Celebrations @ Jaya Engineering College, Chennai

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free and open source software held during third Saturday of September every year. SFD 2009 was celebrated around the world with great zeal and vigour on the 19th September this year.

Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) Club of Jaya Engineering College, Chennai has been an active promoter in the field of Open Source. The Association aims at providing every student with the basic foundation and knowledge so that we build upon in the field of Open Source society. It not only sows the seeds for the academic excellence but also gives equal opportunities to the enthusiastic and creative skills of every student.

SFD ’09 was celebrated on 19th September 2009, in Association with Indian Linux User group, Chennai & CSI Students Chapter. Shri K. Purushothaman, Regional Director, NASSCOM, Tamil Nadu & Kerala would be the chief-guest for the celebrations. Prof. M. Kumaran, Head, Jaya Open Source Centre welcomed the gathering. He have highlighted the power of open source software in the Educational Sector. Prof. R. Raja, Principal and Prof. T.N. Kapaleaswaran, Director, IT delivered the special addresses. Prof. A. Kanagaraj, Chairman, Jaya Educational Trust delivered the presidential address and spoke about the Economical and Licencing aspects of softwares. Prof. G. Bharathi Mohan, Co-ordinator, Jaya FOSS Club, thanked the gathering and delivered various ongoing activity of Jaya FOSS Club.

The wheels of progress turn slowly but surely, encompassing all within their turns. Jaya FOSS Club (JFC) released its souvenir “FLOSSAGE” for the year 2009-10. The magazine compiled many thoughts, ideas, works and achievements of Jaya Engineering Students. It unfolds various budding technologies on Open Source. It contains the current and the future projects of Jaya FOSS Research Centre.

Various Technical Talks by Professionals, Various Contests for Students and Demo stalls were the events that made people think about the burning issues in FOSS. The alumni of our college greeted the occasion and presented their technical talks to the gathering on Birth of Jaya FOSS club, How to make money out of FOSS, How to understand Open Source Projects, iTALC : Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, “Free Software and its relevance in young engineers”,and FOSS in Cloud Computing.

They have done an outstanding job in evangelizing FOSS in communities in and around our college society, and a good portion of it has come through their Talks on Open Source where student representatives conducted full fledged celebrations and upheld the spirit of software freedom. Students and professionals from various colleges and institutes presided over the function.

Students from various departments had immense participation in demonstrating their knowledge on Open Source. There were around 30 Demo stalls which had brought in the efforts of many students in bestowing knowledge to other college students.
Live cd and Installation, FOSS equivalent, Office tools, Internet tools, Browsers, Educational tools, Mathamatical tools, Desktop’s, IDE’s, Compiler collection, FOSS CAD tools, RDBMS, EDA tools, LAMP, CMS, Localization, CASE tools, Scientific python tools, Virtualization, Troubleshooting in UBUNTU and Multimedia were some of the stalls put up in the campus.

There were many other interesting events for the participants which included terminal hack, online quiz, gaming, debugging all based on open source tools.
The students are trained on regular basis by the working group on various open source technologies. Working Groups work on various open source tools and helps in inculcating knowledge to the students. Jaya Engineering College has three Open Source Laboratories with numbering of 400 pcs. where all the Lab Courses of CSE and IT are conducted using Open Source tools like Gcc. G++, PostgreSql, Umbrello, Python, etc.

Jaya FOSS Club provides technical tutoring, FOSS resources and news. For deatils login into www.jayafossclub.org. SFD was a huge success in our Society. SFD itself has motivated many students to adopt the open source tools.

The Jaya FOSS Club is driving the effort, but the event depends largely on the grassroot activities of open source software, advocates organizing many events every year.