What's the IOSN all about?

Subject: [bytesforall_readers] What's the IOSN all about?
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 13:40:43 +0530
From: Frederick Noronha <fred@sancharnet.in>
Organization: BytesForAll.org

What's the IOSN (http://www.iosn.net) all about?

Many Asia Source participants might not be quite aware that this is a place which offers support --
in diverse ways -- to proponents of Free/Libre and Open Source Software in Asia.

"It's based in Kuala Lumpur and we're in our second year now. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption
of FOSS in the Asia-Pacific," says the International Open Source Network manager Sunil Abraham, a
Bangalore techie currently on a sabbatical in that Malaysian capital city.

It's goal, despite the "international" in its name, is primarily to support FLOSS (or FOSS, as some
call it) in the Asia-Pacific region.

"We could support initiatives from other regions, but our main target is the Asia-Pacific, because
our mother organisation is APDIP (the United Nations' Development Programme's Asia-Pacific
Development Information Programme)," explains Abraham.

For more about APDIP see http://www.apdip.net/

IOSN has recently released a number of primers related to FOSS. See their FOSS general introduction,
FOSS government and policy primer, FOSS licensing primer (draft), FOSS network infrastructure and
security (pre-publication version) at http://www.iosn.net/foss-primers

In September 2004, IOSN had a microgrant program for the South Pacific. After the first round of
selections, work is now underway. Some work being done includes a Fijian spell checker for Open
Office, Wikimaps (a combination of Wikis and Geographical Information Systems), some technical work
on a fluid flow generator, and a point-of-sales software.

Abraham feels the response could have been better "because FOSS is probably not that popular in that
region", small and isolated as it continues to largely remain.

Besides this, IOSN.net has also been supporting events -- a couple of talks by Free Software
Foundation guru Richard M Stallman, the Software Freedom Day, training in Vietnam for LPI 'proctors'
(LPI is an institute that offers GNU/Linux training, and proctors are those would could administer
paper-based exams. See http://lpi.org/ )

Currently, they're working with CDAC-India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, for a
localisation know-how toolkit.

SPACE FOR FOSS PROMOTION: On their IOSN.net website, Abraham says they have space for any
FOSS-related activities that needs websites, wikis and other Plone tools. "We have a community of
1200, publishing pages in different languages. It's becoming some kind of knokwledge platform, for
collaborative knowledge building," claims Abraham.

Not long back, IOSN.net shifted servers, after they got "slashdotted" (noted by the influential
geek-luring website slashdot.org) and got a rush of 30,000 visitors to their site. "It was
overwhelming," says Abraham. That happened after they released a user training manual, sometime in
August 2004.

But the Business Software Alliance sent in its own feedback, and obviously wasn't too happy. (Isn't
FOSS also 'business software'?) See their letter at
http://www.iosn.net/foss-primers/bsa-response/Letter_to_IOSN__final_-_...

What does Abraham see as the crucial pressure points for the wider acceptance of FOSS? "In the first
place, it's government policy. The second would be (greater FOSS deployment) in education and schools."

"It's also good to see SMEs (small and medium enterprises), who are making a business out of FOSS,"
says Abraham.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha 784 Near Convent, Sonarbhat SALIGAO GOA India
Freelance Journalist TEL: +91-832-2409490 MOBILE: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.net http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks
fred at bytesforall.org http://www.bytesforall.org

To facilitate co-ordination regarding the introduction of OSS SW in Vietnam

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