For U & Me  |  Insight _______________________________________________________________________________________________

FOSS IS
THE UNSUNG HEROES
There is always an ongoing debate in FOSS circles on how to define a FOSS contributor.What is real
FOSS contribution? Who are the elite contributors, and who are the also-rans? This debate arises from
a fundamental misunderstanding of how FOSS works, and what ‘contribution’ is. And people who waste
everyone’s time in indulging in this debate do not have a clue as to how FOSS projects work.

T
he very point is that the community as such
does not distinguish between a user and a
contributor. Every user is, by definition, also
a contributor—and vice versa. How does
one contribute? By writing code, doing documentation,
translating, testing applications, reporting or fixing bugs,
using applications, advocating FOSS adoption, writing
tutorials, textbooks and how-tos, conducting training
workshops, giving talks at user group meetings, attending
user group meetings, monitoring mailing lists and chat
channels, and asking and answering questions... or by
just talking about FOSS—the list is endless.
Genuine FOSS contributors are absurdly grateful for
even the smallest of contributions to their projects, and
take a lot of time and effort to thank the contributors
and help them out. Yes, even asking a question on a
project mailing list is of enormous help—it shows that
the documentation may be unclear, or the work-flow of
the project confusing. Where would Firefox be without
the lakhs of people who download and use it?
Anyway, it is time to focus on real contributors—
so meet Baskar Selvaraj, CEO of linuXpert systems,
Chennai. For pleasure and profit, Baskar has been
focusing on FOSS in higher education in Tamil Nadu.
Over the past decade, he has criss-crossed the state to
conduct over 170 seminars, workshops and training
programs related to FOSS in higher education. He has
developed his own FOSSLAB server, which can be used
to set up and maintain FOSS labs in colleges. This year,
he has set up FOSS labs in more than 50 engineering and
other colleges in the state, and is confident of breaking
Sehwag’s record for the highest score by an Indian!
He has developed a methodology—the first lab for an
institution is free of cost, the others are paid for—and he
also arranges Faculty Development Programmes, with
the help of local Linux User Groups. Baskar can be
reached at baskar@linuxpert.in.
At the other end of the country is Narendra
Sisodiya from the NCR. When not indulging in his
favourite pastime of chiselling off the Windows
keys on any keyboard he can get hold of, Narendra
is engaged in a plethora of FOSS activities, which
are too numerous to mention here. Among other
things, he is the promoter of LUG@IITD, which
has become the premier Linux Users’ Group in the
NCR. He has set up the portal for jobs at http://
fossjobs.in, and started a project called eduvid (http://
eduvid.techfandu.org), which proposes a whole new
architecture of Web content delivery. Project Svg-Edit
is a sub-project he started, which is now a successful
project; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG-edit.
This has subsequently been taken up by the main SVG
community of developers, and they have extended it.
Still, his main contribution is undoubtedly http://
schoolos.org, a distro for schools around which an
active community for promotion of FOSS in schools
is built. A feature of SchoolOS is that it is completely
without non-free software. He is now launching
ELPA, an online shop to purchase pre-installed Linux
machines. Narendra can be reached at narendra@
narendrasisodiya.com.
So, you see, it is not that hard to contribute! Check
out when these people are next in your neighbourhood,
and lend them a helping hand! Or meet them online,
and help out.
By: Kenneth Gonsalves
Kenneth Gonsalves is a FOSS activist and consultant
based in Ooty and can be reached at lawgon@
thenilgiris.com

20  |  January 2011  | LINUX For You  |  www.LinuxForU.com