FOSSCOMM - India's national FOSS network

Some of us in the FOSS Community in India had been thinking that a national coalition of such individuals/ organizations and associations should be formed that will work towards the widespread adoption and promotion of FOSS. Such a network of organizations working along a broad consensus on promoting FOSS will be able to provide stronger and more effective responses to events relating to FOSS as well as initiate proactive actions than perhaps individuals or institutions acting in isolation. Taking this thought forward, a number of organizations and individuals have come together as FOSSCOMM - a civil society alliance of organizations and individuals working to promote use of free and open source software (FOSS) in India.

FOSSCOMM had its first meeting in Bangalore in Feb 2009. The meeting was attended by representatives of NGOs, GNU/Linux user groups, academicians, researchers and FOSS enterprises, from Bangalore and some parts of the country.The purpose of this meeting was to get discussions started on the principles, structures and activities of the coalition. A synergised task list was drawn up as a result of this meeting. Some of the activities that got underway after the network was initiated are - a pilot project to train government school teachers on GNU/Linux, work on mounting a legal challenge to monopolistic trade practices in the software sector, projects on localization issues in GNU/Linux etc. A mailing list and a wiki (http://fosscomm.in) was also set-up as a follow through action from the meeting.

FOSSCOMM then had its second meeting in New Delhi on 4th July, 2009. Some of the issues discussed in this meeting were FOSS in Education and how the FOSS community can support the same, Working to counter the challenges of software patents and other legal issues Working towards open formats and open standards, building political consensus around FOSS adoption in India Engaging with the ICT policy space.Various possible collaborations were discussed and decided upon. These include workshops on FOSS in education, collaboratively working with schools and colleges on FOSS adoption etc.

The formation of FOSSCOMM has also helped in countering the challenges to FOSS in the policy space. Recently India released a Draft National Policy on open standards for e-governance. Some proprietary software companies tried to dilute the policy by trying to get it amended to include multiple standards and royalty-encumbered standards. FOSSCOMM has been running a campaign to ensure that the policy is not diluted and continues to support only single , royalty free standards.

The formation of this pan-Indian network, the first such network for FOSS adoption in the country augurs well for FOSS adoption in India.