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Swecha's 15 Day Free Software Camp
The ongoing 15 days Free Software Summer Camp hosted by Swecha/FSMI at CBIT/MGIT campuses in Hyderabad that began on June 15 is a unique effort of its kind. The workshop has been aimed to facilitate budding software engineers across the country with an exposure to the culture of Free Software.
The four fundamental freedoms of free software are the freedom to run the program for any purpose (freedom 0); freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1); freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2) and freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for these freedoms. It provides students/individuals with an opportunity to contribute towards the society by way of contributing towards free software. A student to be transformed into an effective programmer needs to have an exposure to the way in which code is written, how it works and how one can add to it. The current version of the Debian (considered as the mother of many Linux distributions like, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Knoppix etc), a free software operating system, has nearly 3.24 billions of lines of source code available.
The culture of collaborative learning and developing has pushed the proprietary systems aside. A study made of Debian Linux version 2.2 (also known as "Potato") which was originally released in August 2000, found that it included over 55 million SLOC, and if developed in a conventional proprietary way, it would have required 14,005 man-years and cost $1.9 billion USD to develop. All existing knowledge is an incremental accumulation of experience through ages and computing science is not an exception to it. Rather, any measures of putting a cap on this method have always proved futile pushing back the societies progress by ages, as in the context of India where knowledge has been confined to a limited sections of the society for long.
Divya, a student from Narayanamma College of Engineering, claims of being benefited with this method of collaborative learning and working employed in this workshop. “I was interested in software and hence joined engineering, but this exposure teaches me that software is also a lot of fun. I am now learning the fundamental principles of best practises to be followed in coding.” The ability to see through the code and develop on it is just proving helpful in avoiding the rediscovery of the wheel. About 40 teams have been constituted with the total participants. Each team is trying to learn things and work collaboratively. In a session on the content management systems, with Drupal software as a case study, the team has built a portal in a span of three days.
The fifteen days are divided into five three-day modules to enhance the focussed exposure students would be getting on the technologies. Comprehensive theory sessions to start the day, followed by marathon lab sessions in about 20 labs – all running Debian – have been arranged for every participant to work on.
Making of a Computer Suite Programming using Software Carpentry aspects, Mobile Computing, Multimedia Content Management Systems are the technologies that the students are currently working on.
Raghavendra Selvan, a resource person from Bangalore, says “Free Software in the air by alone was sufficient to draw someone like me into the ambience of the workshop, but adding to it was Swecha as the host. I did pull one of our budding activists along this time, and I’m hoping he did get motivated further to carry on his work. I handled a session on Distributed Social Networking, taking Diaspora as an example. The importance of Internet to become decentralised and for the users to have control over their data in the current context of Internet technologies were touched upon in my talk. The overall reception of the talk was good, and there was some good interaction about the same all through the day.”
Swamy Das, faculty member at CBIT who is co-ordinating the camp, says he is surprised to see the students en masse working late hours in the lab and pursuing new learning methods. He says that his niece, who was reluctant to come to the camp, is now confident and is an active participant in the Group Discussions and coding events.
Each of the days, after the regular sessions and labs, sessions on the philosophy, policies, licensing and social ramifications of the technology are being held on a daily basis, which are equally important when compared to the technologies. Team-events and cultural programmes have got all the participants enthusiastically engaged.
There are better and more exciting sessions, talks and interactions in the days to come. Speakers of the likes of Prabir Purkayastha, P Sainath will be participating in the camp.
Dr Chennakesava Rao and Dr Chandramohan Reddy, principals of CBIT and MGIT respectively, are in person overseeing the support systems to ensure the smooth running of the camp. Anything for public good and volunteers running the event we are for it they say. Apart from the sports and cultural events, the resource persons who are faculty members and employees from the industry are set to break the conventional hierarchical methods of teaching and learning and making learning process a fun through this workshop.